When you’ve decided to dig in, it might be advisable to ensure you don’t burrow so deep that scrambling out is no longer an option. The Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, Mehbooba Mufti, is darting, helplessly but consciously, towards making a political grave of her power dugout. Her serial capitulations to the provincial shenanigans and the national worldview of her chosen partner, the Bharatiya Janata Party, are as astonishing as they are unsurprising.

Unsurprising because a dark, and yet unstated though frightfully abject, compromise was written into her decision to fall in step with the BJP after prolonged prevarication. Astonishing because no Kashmiri chief minister in living memory has been so sublime in submitting to routine rebuff and remonstration at the hands of an ally – the kind of heckling and humiliation that cannot be going down terribly well with the constituency she so painstakingly built over the years.

The latest of many snubs that Mehbooba has taken is her government’s declaration, doubtless extracted by some backroom arm-twisting, to the Supreme Court that Major Aditya Kumar of the 10th Garhwal Rifles was not named in an FIR by her police as one of those responsible for opening fire on a mob near Shopian that resulted in the deaths of two civilians in late January. If this isn’t a patent lie, it most certainly is a deferent volte-face few will fail to notice, not least her unquiet south Kashmiri citizenry. Mehbooba’s police and her party – the Peoples Democratic Party – had openly rowed with the army over the incident; Major Kumar’s father, himself a serving army officer, had gone to the Supreme Court protesting that his son was sought to be unfairly prosecuted. But Mehbooba sounded firm about addressing the killings, “Anguished over the tragic loss of lives in Shopian,” she had tweeted soon after the incident, “… have ordered a magisterial probe into the unfortunate incident and asked the enquiry to be completed within 20 days… We will take the probe to its logical conclusion. Justice and peace are two sides of the same coin.” Her counsel’s submission to the Supreme Court on Monday – my lords we have not named a Major Aditya Kumar – clarified to us yet again that Mehbooba is allowed neither magistracy over a probe she’s ordered nor her promised logical conclusions.

A quite akin atrophy has embodied her treatment of the troubling aftermath of the brutal rape and murder of a minor tribal girl in Kathua. This bears summary recounting because what has followed the horrific crime is an even more disquieting narrative. Investigations into whatever became of the missing eight-year-old eventually led to the arrest of a special police officer, Deepak Khajuria. The police said it had evidence of Khajuria’s guilt, and of threatening an underage accomplice into silence over their murderous delinquency with the child. The case was handed over to the crime branch for further probe and investigation. At this stage, Mehbooba’s allies and their cohorts intervened on Khajuria’s behalf. An outfit that calls itself the Hindu Ekta Manch, one of the many battering rams bred in the sangh nursery, took vociferously to the streets – they flayed Khajuria’s arrest and lit into Gujjar and Bakerwal tribals as brigand communities that shielded terrorists. Creed had come to arbitrate on crime – Khajuria, being who he was, could not be held guilty for committing horrors on the girl, being who she was. They are at the root of so much trouble, these Gujjars and Bakerwals, went the cry, throw them out of here! The Manch made a cause célèbre of an alleged rapist and murderer and a whipping board of the tribals – boo, boo, black sheep. The campaign culminated in a rally in Jammu. Two of Mehbooba’s ministers – Chander Prakash Ganga and Chaudhary Lal Singh – attended it to make common cause with Khajuria.

Mehbooba was irked enough to publicly moan and carp. “Appalled by the marches and protests in defence of the recently apprehended rapist in Kathua. Also horrified by their use of our national flag in these demonstrations, this is nothing short of desecration.” Twitter rage and Twitter tears – admissions, at once, of incompetence and impotence.

All the horror and desecration Mehbooba railed over was, after all, the handiwork of members of her government and those that inspire their politics. The marches and protests were facilitated and watched over by a police force that reports to her. She was powerless to thwart sectarian and unabashedly ignoble protests coursing through Jammu; she wasn’t able to instruct her ministers to stay away. She wasn’t even able to name and shame them. They continue to sit on her cabinet and thumb their noses at her.

The plain fact is Mehbooba has rendered herself the head of a government she does not command, perhaps never has. She often has the freedom of her Twitter handle – the odd demand made, a disapproval suggested, an outcry articulated – ‘We shall not put up with this!’ Should you travel down her timeline it will suggest to you that the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister has done a lot of putting up with.

Her powerful allies don’t care what she thinks or wants as long as she makes her shoulder available for them to shoot from and her hands to sign on the dotted line. Her constituency, whose aspirations run in violent disagreement with the BJP, can, by now, see through the chasm between what Mehbooba once championed and the charade she has come to enact; the real pity is it isn’t even an enactment of her own making; it mimics the motions of a puppet on a string. An oft tormented one too.

New Delhi has repeatedly shut the doors on her sorties to demand talks with Pakistan. The promise to initiate dialogue with all stakeholders in pursuit of a resolution to the Kashmir tangle – and this was a key undertaking of the agenda for governance Mehbooba and the BJP signed on – lies junked. Instead, her allies seldom seem to tire of needling her where they know it would hurt – invoking the need to abrogate Article 370, pushing a judicial review of Article 35A, another constitutional guarantor of Kashmir’s special place in the Indian scheme. She routinely complains about far too many collateral deaths in anti-militancy operations; she is routinely advised to shut up, the civilians you talk about are all complicit, the collateral tragedies all deserved. Mehbooba says she won’t put up with it, then she puts up.

The unfavourably inclined will say that her father, the late Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, spent his twilight sleeping with the enemy and was probably blessed he never had to get off bed to face the consequences. Mehbooba cannot hope to be half as fortunate.

When the Mufti embraced the BJP in 2015 what warmth there was for him in Kashmir turned cold. That frost came to rest upon his final place on earth. The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interr’d with their bones: Shakespearean tragedy has a canny kinship with Kashmir, extant fact validating classic fiction. The late Mufti lies cold in his Bijbehara grave; his daughter lives on with the consequences in a ditch falling deeper underfoot.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/03/11/a-puppet-in-torment/feed/1sankarshanthakurHum pill de chuke sanamhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/03/11/hum-pill-de-chuke-sanam/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/03/11/hum-pill-de-chuke-sanam/#commentsSun, 11 Mar 2018 06:07:09 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1140Continue reading Hum pill de chuke sanam]]>Holy shit! Now, before you start to make erroneous assumptions about my upbringing being uncultured, or lighting into me for being poorly spoken, think again. What else can this shit be but holy. I do not even wish to so much as append that sentence with a question mark; that’s merely, and as any intelligent person would instantly recognise, rhetorical. It is cow shit. Or bull shit. In any or either event, it is shit off bovine orifices. This shit must be holy. Gau. Mata. Saandh. Pita . Okay, forget the saandh and the pita, let’s not be patriarchal for once. Just think Gau. Then the natural thought is Mata. (And very often, then, the natural thought is also Bharat, for Bharat too has a Mata, but let’s focus on immediate concerns for the moment, let’s not get ahead of the script.) Then think shit. Plop, plop!! Holy. Shit. Holyshit! Do not blame me for being poorly brought up. Or for being poorly spoken. If that does not constitute holy shit, you are either fit to be labelled anti-national or I am so much an intoxicated Bhakt, I no longer understand the consequences of being drunk upon what’s dripping down those udders.

Look at them, just look at the state of them. Gau and what the Gau begot. Just for a moment behold them and the plenty around them. Behold the sheer pride and richness of being Gau in these times. They shat, and they created a beauteous plenty about them. Just look at them. It’s like they shat jewels, priceless jewels. One of them, if you were to carefully observe the accompanying illustration, has already shat and is proudly saluting with its tail all there is to be saluted, and the other is in the process of shitting more of the richness that this kind of shit has already conjured. Holy shit. Holy shit! Just look at the pair of them at work, one just done, the other in the process. Begetting holy shit in surrounds already and instantly and visibly enriched by holy shit. It’s all lush, the topography seeded with holy shit, can you not bring yourself to see?

Sometimes you so deeply wish Mahadeb were here, around his life’s chosen station, to see what his ilk can also achieve; what makes the critical cut between a chaiwala and The Chaiwala. It’s all down to him, all of this holy shit. It is he who inspired them, these cows, to shit so copiously they came to be counted as national treasures: Mothers of Holy Shit. He fed them the magic pill, you see, the pill that made them shit and shit and shit so voluminously a jungle sprung around them. Just look. Just look at the abundance around them, it’s all down to the pill The Chaiwala fed them in singular pursuit of his keen sense of national duty. The more the shit, the greater the service to the nation. Shit and serve. Or rather, induce shit and serve. Mahadeb, and sundry chaiwalas, do take note. This is how national duty is done.

We underestimate TheBossOfAllThings, criminally so. We assumed last week that he shall enlighten us on DhanKiBaat. Trust him to spring a surprise. He went further and spoke to us of GobarDhanKiBaat. GobarDhan, the sheer richness of it. It goes down, plop, and turns a many-splendoured thing, from manure to medicine for the most arcane ailment. It flies up, pfffffft, and turns a piece of art beginning with an F. You get the drift. It’s tremendously powerful, the drift of GobarGas. And there’s entire armadas of it scudding about. It has been scientifically established, after all, that one bovine entity is able to expel as much as 100 kilos of pfffft every year. And we have a population of those running into several millions; and now that the WowVigilante’s have taken it upon themselves to zealously, even murderously, protect and preserve, the count is going up, As is pffffft! It’s one of the things that’s able to effortlessly blow holes in the ozone layer. Now many people think that’s not such a good thing, this business of excreted methane and what it does to the atmosphere, but them folks are reduced, mundane folks, they cannot see beyond. It’s when you blow holes in the ozone that you get a peek at the heavens, and it’s through them holes that real wisdoms come to drop upon us. Now where would we be without GobarDhan, or the man who as recently as last Sunday took time off to inform the nation of its earthly and unearthly richness.

Be not ashamed should some one sayYour brains are full of dungTell them the truth, Oh, but heyShit is what had the nation swung.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/03/11/hum-pill-de-chuke-sanam/feed/1sankarshanthakurOur national dish: Pakoda!https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/19/our-national-dish-pakoda/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/19/our-national-dish-pakoda/#respondMon, 19 Feb 2018 04:30:10 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1135Continue reading Our national dish: Pakoda!]]>You may have no excuses, you were told a full week ago: India has been done dana done, done dana done, Done. NothingHappened has finally been banished, thank you and GodBless, things are happening, they are getting DONE. Bakoda has said it is getting done, and Bakoda can say no wrong. Bakoda has proclaimed all it requires is Pakoda.

Make a Pakoda and all shall be done dana done done, so Bakoda says and so all patriotic folks should believe, for the good reason that Bakoda says so… Make a Pakoda, and all thereafter shall be well.

Bakoda knows, trust me, he has been making Pakodas all his life. He may call himself a chaiwala, but that’s just him being humble. Bakoda is a terribly humble man, we know that, so humble he was willing to call himself a chaiwala when he was to the monogrammed suit born, each suit worth tens of lakhs. And yet he said he was a mere chaiwala! Such is his sublime humility. At the first hint of criticism he cast that monogrammed suit away, auctioned it off. What’s a suit for such a man as Bakoda, he gave it the boot. And so was born that insidious allegation that his is a suit-boot ki sarkar. All because he booted the suit.

What has the world come to? Maa-kasam, Bakoda shall never don that suit again. (Psst, he never does wear a suit, or anything that he wears, a second time, but we aren’t telling anyone that, are we? Boot the suit is such a fabulous riposte to suit-boot, we just can’t get over how clever we are, but hush!)

And daren’t you laugh. That’s not a good thing to be doing. Laughter is anti-national. It reeks of treacherous collaborations with Surpanakha and Tadaka, or even Ravan, who’s to tell? Laughter means you are on the other side of the GreatGoodLord who lost his cradle which we are struggling to gift back to him because He Himself apparently cannot. We shall build it, come what may — cradle waheen banaayenge.

And while Project CradleWaheenBanaayenge proceeds, we shall also dedicate ourselves to the other patriotic duty of PakodaAurBanaayenge.

Bakoda said Pakoda! And Bakoda means business. Just as Pakoda means business, an oily business, but a business all the same. But Pakoda doesn’t come easy. Rome wasn’t made in a day, making Pakoda is a slightly more complex undertaking. You’ll see, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

You are a little on the daft side, you need explaining. You thought DoneKiBaat will be done in one week, between the space of last week and this one? So much has been done. But that’s not it; done dana done is yet to unravel and come into its own. It is almost an unpatriotic audacity for someone to try to suggest all DoneDanaDanDone has been done in the space of two Sundays and fewer words than Bakoda spews on the last Sunday of each month. Things take time. How long did NothingHappened last, after all? Seven decades, or thereabouts? And you expect that to be undone in seven days? God did that, yes, but Bakoda isn’t God, or is he? He may be, my apologies, he may well be.

Who else could reveal to humankind the magical thing that is Pakoda? Mahadeb missed a trick. That is why he remained a chaiwala and Bakoda became The Chaiwala. He had Pakoda to go with his chai. Pakoda is what separates all chaiwalas from The Chaiwala.

Pakoda is panacea; it is what we have always needed and were never told until Bakoda did us the favour. Pakoda is everything. Imagine what it does to unemployment, our biggest problem and Bakoda’s biggest promise. Pakoda needs vegetables. Employment. Pakoda needs dough and batter. Employment. Pakoda needs oil. Employment. Pakoda needs utensils. Employment. Pakoda needs fuel. Employment. Pakoda needs cooks. Employment. Pakoda needs chutney. Employment. Pakoda needs vendors. Employment. Pakoda needs Pakoda eaters. Employment. What do you do? I eat Pakoda. How much more gainfully can you get employed than to be a professional Pakoda eater? So if you are not making Pakoda, eat Pakoda, do your national duty.

Deeah Leader has sounded the call

So laziness please do shun

Get down to work in earnest, all

And serve us a Pakoda, well done.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/19/our-national-dish-pakoda/feed/0sankarshanthakurHaven’t you ever heard UnKiBaat?https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/18/havent-you-ever-heard-unkibaat/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/18/havent-you-ever-heard-unkibaat/#commentsSun, 18 Feb 2018 04:30:01 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1132Continue reading Haven’t you ever heard UnKiBaat?]]>Mahadeb hasn’t done a spot of work these past months. Or if he has, he’s proffered no evidence of it. He’s not God that he works in invisible ways; he’s merely called Mahadeb, he’s proffered no evidence he may also be God. But then God does work in invisible ways if not also ineffable, so perhaps it is wise to not press the point. Please God, no offence meant. #JustSaying.

But hashtags apart, what has Mahadeb been up to? He has probably become part of this country where people were subjected to NothingHappened for so long that they got so used to it that they do nothing. Wherever you go in this country, people are doing nothing. They are sitting on their haunches and looking left then right as if they were seated ringside on a tennis Grand Slam clash. They do not even sit there and shoot the air, for had they all together shot the air they’d have expelled all pollution. Imagine the national service of our billions seated on their haunches, shooting air. Flights and trains landing on time. Children not wheezing at school. Adults not having to measure SPM levels before they let their children out into the dreadful outdoors. The KaamAadmiParty boss not having to tear himself away from kaam and enrol in a breathing class. Honourable members of the HouseOfBabel not having to stoop to taunting the nobility of MakeInIndia by peddling NotMadeInIndia air purifiers. One of them is so patently anti-national that she advertises some county in a country which is actually a little island that kept our whole humongous subcontinent enslaved for centuries before we struggled and struggled and gave ourselves NothingHappened. Oh, if only all among us who sit on our haunches just shot the air in unison! But we are such ingrates, we have no sense of national pride; what will become of us, Maaaaa! Which cry should also remind us, if we are at all patriots, of Mooooo! Excuse me? Anyhow. Whatever.

Mahadeb must be ashamed. Look at what The Chaiwala has achieved meantime. For those who don’t do the patriotic duty of tuning into DoneKiBaat every last Sunday of the month, let me bring you up to date. Everything, bhaaiyon-behnon, has been done dana done, done dana done, DONE!

Black Money menace. Tick. Demonetised. Dead. Swiss Money recovery. Tick. What did you think he was in Davos for, posing in the snowfall?

Fifteen lakh rupees in each account. Tick. It was a jumla, now don’t go on and on about it.

Ganga clean-up. Tick. It’s pure as it drips from Gangotri, check out the bottle you had your last gulp off. It was hand-filled by the river-bank at Benaras. (AMBULAANCE!!)

Jobs to millions. Tick. And for those still looking, many more situations are vacant at WowVigilante.com, ShoveJehad.com, VarniSena.com, JobsInBakistan.bk, just Gospel it, there are many more where these came from.

Universal electrification. Tick. Didn’t the minister tell us, if they try hard and patriotically enough, even London will look as bright as our motherland from the satellites one day?

Settling Pakistan. Tick. Why do you think our military facilities have been breached and our borders pounded like never before? They’re frustrated, man, samjha karo.

Minimum government, Maximum governance. Tick. Just do a double-check whether you have your Niraadhaar number yet; that done, please check which department of what ministry you need to line up at posthumously in order that they verify you for jannat or jahannum, wherever you are headed, dearies.

Achchhe Din. Tick … tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…

We’re on our way

And the way is swell

Everything, as they say

Is perfectly in the well.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/18/havent-you-ever-heard-unkibaat/feed/1sankarshanthakurNarendra Modi and Our Derelictions as Mediahttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/17/narendra-modi-and-our-derelictions-as-media/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/17/narendra-modi-and-our-derelictions-as-media/#respondSat, 17 Feb 2018 13:12:42 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1138Continue reading Narendra Modi and Our Derelictions as Media]]>The Press seems happy to be co-opted by the government

Just a thought, if only as hors d’oeuvre: Sanjaya was arguably the first television reporter known to us, relaying the great battle live from a far distance. Imagine the consequences of Sanjaya telling Dhritarashtra what would please his ears rather than what transpired as the Kauravas and Pandavas had it off. All it would have taken for an epic subversion of the truth was one obsequious reporter willing to compromise with his craft to curry favour with his master.

After a prime minister lavishly lambasted for never speaking – “Maun Mohan Singh” – we elected a prime minister who never seems to tire of speaking. Some of that, we have been told by his own, amounts to no more than jumlas. But there is a more disturbing aspect to Narendra Modi’s mode of speaking. It’s one-sided.

Modi is into the final lap of his term and he is yet to open himself to questioning in a way that has been the assumed norm for all his predecessors. Our prime minister has his say and he would have no more. On Twitter. On diverse social-media platforms and dedicated web portals. On Mann ki Baat. To commissioned cameras from government-aided or government-allied operations that can be trusted to obey command, pack off and promote the puff. He does not grant interviews, not in the way we should understand them. The complicit silence over how interviews with the prime minister are conducted must be broken. Because people need to know. Here is how it’s done – you may mail a set of questions to one of the prime minister’s aides; they, or the prime minister himself, will examine them and pick which ones are convenient. Of those that the Prime Minister’s Office rejects or refuses to answer, there shall be no mention, or even a record. Subsequently, answers will be formulated and mailed back.

Then, at a convenient time, there shall be a window of time in which interviewer and interviewee will stage a photo-session to make it seem what it never was. The farce falls a bit during television interviews, of the kind Modi has deigned to recently grant; they are so scripted to one man’s purposes, they end up being choreographies of sycophancy.

Modi is the fullness of his mentor Lal Krishna Advani’s stinging compliment – event manager. The Modi interview is an event Modi manages, often even dictating how a question may be framed or intoned. It all ends up like the title of the celebrated Norman Mailer book of essays: Advertisements for Myself.

What is beyond him to manage, he merely brazens through. During his 2014 power-push, he once found himself arrested in the aircraft seat across from a reporter pressing for a response on the 2002 horrors in Gujarat. He kept admiring the far sunset through the cabin window as if he were sitting there solitary. When, having become prime minister, he decided to bundle the media off his official aircraft, he peddled it as a cut on freebies at public expense. Deboarding the media was never so much about accounting of public money as it was about minimizing his own accountability. Truth be told, all that the media took free on the prime minister’s trips were seats on a public aircraft that goes empty anyway. All other expenses were borne by media houses that assigned journalists to cover the prime minister. But Modi doesn’t want to get into situations where he faces questions and must answer them.

The highest virtue of a King is that he should do no wrong; the highest vice is that he should assume he can do no wrong. From such vice issues the notion of not being accountable or answerable.

But where does all this leave the media? And here’s where a return to Sanjaya, that original television reporter, is instructive. Are we reporting the Mahabharat as it plays out, or are we relaying a dictated version of it? Are we doing the watchdog job, as we should, or have we turned lapdogs? The call, frequently made by Modi himself, to “constructive” and “positive” journalism is a thing to be forever wary of, because it is the surest direction into alleys where the media can get lost on its purposes. In addition to the Soviet-style inheritance of a mammoth publicity machine that our governments have possessed in the name of the Press Information Bureau, there exists today an elaborate privately hired PR enterprise at Modi’s disposal. Rs 37,54,06,23,616 is how much he spent on propaganda between 2014 and last October. In addition, there thrives a swift and supple information disorder complex on social media that flaunts a stupefying repertoire of talents – it can invent, twist, distort, distract, divert, disrupt; it is swift to receive and comply with command. It can lie a thousand Goebbelsian times to make a lie sound like the truth: “Nothing happened in India until Narendra Modi ascended to command.” The scheme is as simplistic as it is mendacious; and it is probably also popular because it makes few demands of its consumer – nuance, analysis, understanding, study, scrutiny not required. It’s how most mobs behave, on leave from sense and sensibility, sublimated to a celebration of mindlessness. Collective derangement has frightening precedents. It’s what such a mindful disorder has partially already caused; the palpable lack of disapproval of lynch mobs is proof.

The means to curtail, contain and distract the media freedom have become far more diverse and subtle in our world and it isn’t unfair to suggest that the media themselves have become a party to this insidious process. We revel in a selfie moment with the prime minister, daftly unmindful that the prime minister has revelled in it more because he hasn’t been asked a question.

The media are only too happy to collaborate in its co-option by the government, so much so that the powers almost assume journalists to be their allies, if not adjuncts. Ready access to the powers, an appointment, or a story, your peers will not get. All these on the condition that the story the government does not want told shall not be told. We are, more and more, part of such convivial clubs. We have bartered away the essence of our calling for the seductions of an exaggerated, if altogether false, sense of power. We have allowed ourselves to be sucked in by the Establishment. We might know the inside story but we have become so much the Insiders ourselves that we will not tell it. We revel in carrying secret messages from this politician to that, not in revealing them. We are no longer content being reporters reporting on games people play; we want to be players ourselves. We do not want to be in the press gallery of Parliament, we aspire to sit in the House of Parliament. There was a time a journalist’s worth was measured by how much awe he inspired in the Establishment. Today, journalistic stature is about how much part of the Establishment you are. Partisanship, in its narrowest sense, isn’t a vice that stains journalistic careers, it has become a certificate of virtue. It’s price is our vocation itself. It’s the price Sanjaya would have paid to all posterity had he told the story according to Dhritarashtra.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/17/narendra-modi-and-our-derelictions-as-media/feed/0sankarshanthakurOutsiders on the inside of the Hillhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/17/outsiders-on-the-inside-of-the-hill/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/17/outsiders-on-the-inside-of-the-hill/#respondSat, 17 Feb 2018 12:58:15 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1129Continue reading Outsiders on the inside of the Hill]]>There is the CapitolHill and then there is the CapitalHill. Similar men look down the two hills, men who seem to get along like a house on fire, as they say, and since they came to assume their respective positions of vantage, they’ve caused enough fire around them, not that they mind. You get the drift, though you should be careful about keeping that drift away from fire’s way. We are talking about TheTossOfAllThings and TheBossOfAllThings, both brassy Outsider-Insiders upending their respective hills, alpha males both, one Genghis, the other Khan, although neither would take kindly to being called either name. They make that clear, unpretty clear – names, or any other thing, from that stable are unacceptable, anathema.

And so it is that they have softer, more likeable monikers – BlondieDuck and BeardieLuck, so called because he once bragged to an assembly of poll-bound people that all the luck was on his side. It came to happen that all the votes that election gathered up on the opposite end. But BeardieLuck remains a lucky man. The jury is out on how long it will take to run out on him. We are a democracy and democracies are fickle systems, picky, choosy, re-electy, rejecty. Unreasonable. Capricious. Wise men are aware of that sort of thing, or (psst) they should be for their own good. BeardieLuck knows because nobody can disagree that for all his numerous frailties, he is a wise man. He was just treated to a close shave at home. He got away pretending he’d only got himself a cut he’d desired, close-shaven, almost too close to the skin. Luck stayed, it trimmed him but it spared him any bloodshed. He’s safe on top of CapitalHill.

Below which, like FoggyBottom of CapitolHill, is SoggyBottom – a vast water-squelched bank of grass upon which stand mannequin trees, their branches pruned to perfection, their leaves coiffured, not one out of place. Ravens rule here, pecking about on the knoll as if they were peacocks; but that works, it’s the age of pretenders. There are other birds about, some circling overhead, others on the edge of the grass, afraid to step on. There’s no great mystery to why. The ones preening on the grass are all Aadhaar-linked, the others haven’t subscribed to the grand scheme, they must live deprived, in banishment from the perk of the park of CapitalHill.

Would you reckon it’s strange that nobody calls it that? Not so, not strange at all. Because most folk are incapable of adding one and one. They keep adding two and two because those are the integers they have been brought up to add in the idiom class, and when they come up with four each time and not five they are like, Eureka!, what a bright thing I’ve discovered for myself! Lakeer ke fakeer! Such a simple thing to add one and one. A capital. A hill. CapitalHill. There! And remember, whatever two and two might make, one and one make one. A capital. A hill. CapitalHill. Some people also call it RiseInAHill, although why, nobody seems to have a notion for nothing seems to rise in the hill, at least not in public view. The sun, that most public of things, rises on the opposite end from it and comes to set behind RiseInAHill, in which case RiseInAHill would surely have been called SetInAHill. Which would have been a fitting name because that’s the angle at which the sun takes CapitalHill each twilight and then plunges it in darkness for varying periods depending on how elliptical angles and distances measure at varying times in relation to other objects whirring about in the cosmos.

Anyhow, let’s get away from such complex trigonometry, it’s not a Sunday thing, this trigonometry. Personally speaking, it was never an any day thing, no metry was, they all, singly and collectively, for some reason reminded me of cemetery. And so, banish the thought, not on a Sunday. Not when our thoughts, or at least some of the thoughts of some among us, are on Mahadeb, may he be well, wherever it is that he has chosen to be gone. He’s nowhere here, the sentries would have surely got him. CapitalHill is no place for people on the loose, such a tight place it is. Wonder where he is, though.

Perhaps he too is not

Linked to Aadhaar yet

And so perhaps he thought

Best to be gone while I get.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/02/17/outsiders-on-the-inside-of-the-hill/feed/0sankarshanthakurLaloo Yadav, Burnished and Tarnishedhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/01/04/laloo-yadav-burnished-and-tarnished/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/01/04/laloo-yadav-burnished-and-tarnished/#commentsThu, 04 Jan 2018 13:01:53 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1127Continue reading Laloo Yadav, Burnished and Tarnished]]>The thing about Lalu Prasad is that he is a man of more parts than most others on display possess. One of those parts has been convicted and may well be ordered to prison, the part that got greedy and fell to fodder felony. Some of the other parts remain more happily located – as preponderant colour on the floor of the Bihar assembly; as irreplaceable boss of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the state’s largest single banker of votes; as essential exhibit in the gallery of the most compelling and durable of our public entities. Nobody is taking Lalu out of there in a long time; popular imagination is a sovereignty membered by the unlikeliest heroes.

Bihar has never been at a loss for those who set out to make something of it. In the narrow firmament of Bihar’s consciousness, they make a clotted constellation of visionaries and builders, reformists and revolutionaries, samaritans and messiahs. Sri Krishna Sinha, Anugrah Narain Singh, Krishna Ballabh Sahay. Jayaprakash Narayan and Karpoori Thakur. Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav and Jagannath Mishra. They have either been forgotten, some mercifully, or live on in dust-ridden memorial halls and annually enacted rent-a-crowd commemorations. Or survive as disregarded busts routinely s**t upon by birds in chaotic town squares. For all the retrospective repute they have come to acquire, the gifts of Bihar’s league of legends don’t add up to much.

Eighty per cent of Biharis still have no access to toilets, partly also because those meant to be making those toilets have been busier making money over them. What passes in the name of education is nothing short of scandalous; Bihar’s premier university cannot fill out basic criteria for an upgrade. Its most reputed medical facilities often lack for rudiments – a saline drip, a sterilized bandage, a functional X-ray device, an urgently required LSD. No more than 20 and few decimal per cent receive regular electricity at home. A mere seven per cent live in concrete homes. Sixty five per cent possess mobile phones. That is how lopsided Bihar’s lurch towards development has been. You could be talking about Haiti where, in 2012, only ten per cent had bank accounts and 80 per cent used hand-held telephones.

For the last quarter of a century, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar have presided over those spoils, briefly in league but for the better part at loggerheads. Bihar is still out adorned in its badge of deficits, brandishing that begging bowl for special category status. Nobody has bothered looking in the direction of that bowl. Meantime, careers have flourished and reputations built, foundation stone by derelict foundation stone. Some years ago, the state government sponsored a listing of Bihar’s leading lights and luminaries, such as they are. Bihar Vibhuti, the compendium was christened, and last heard, it had run into two volumes, each thick as a brick. There is fair evidence to suggest that the collective achievement of Bihar’s countless vibhutis has been that they came to drop; Bihar is a bonfire of those vanities.

For his sheer phosphorescence of persona and emboss of intervention, Lalu is a standout character of that cast. He burnished the stage with native brilliance and wove a loyalty that remains enduringly seduced; but he also enthralled his adversaries by lavishly tarnishing himself.

Lalu is a rare sighting; Bihar, at any rate, hadn’t seen his like, nor will in a while. An almost animal alchemy of charm, cunning and chutzpah. Some find it convenient to keep him reduced to his frequent resorts to buffoonery but if a buffoon is all that Lalu is, he would have been easier to put away. Frustratingly for critics, he is more than merely the sum of his frivolities and foibles. His impact on the socio-political dynamics of Bihar is not merely undeniable, it is essential, deep and, most likely, indelible. He kindled a social and political consciousness in huge sections that had remained hectored to the margins, and gave them a sense of stakes. His backward revolution was flawed and stunted, but it acted as a release valve on pent-up pressures that had been building up in Bihar’s iniquitous and exploitative social structure for hundreds of years. If he hadn’t arrived on the scene when he did, his north Bihar home ground, the great laboratory of his social surgery, would probably have exploded into violence like parts of central and what used to be south Bihar. He gave social frustration political vent. And in an era of sweeping communal turmoil, he afforded the Muslims of Bihar a secure and unshakeable canopy that they rightly remain indebted for.

It is handy to blame Lalu for all that ails Bihar. The truth is a preceding menagerie had long been on the job. In many respects more sin lies pinned on Lalu than he ever had the time or the talent to conjure. In the cognitive realm of upper castes in Bihar, Judgment Day’s justice would probably be a manacled Lalu being dragged to the gallows. He stands convicted, after all, for that other great crime no court will take cognizance of – he undid upper caste hegemony and installed his own, he unleashed a caste-war. But did he? The caste-war had already been raging. Only, it was a one-sided war; the upper castes did all the pillaging, the nether castes lay pillaged. Lalu stood up and said no more, he took the battle to the barricades. Casteism in Bihar was never a Lalu-generated phenomenon; he was its flaming product.

At the peak of his powers in the mid-1990s, Lalu seemed invincible behind that fort he had swiftly crafted with the masonry he pulverized. But secure forts come with a statutory warning seldom heeded – they can promote profligacy and pamper their habitué beyond measure. Lalu went heady on power, let arrogance and hunger get the better of him. He had arrived pregnant with magical promise but he delivered a hell replete with derelictions and worse. Consequences followed; there was a price to pay. It is probably a tribute to his political vigour and endurance that Lalu still owns a credible chequebook to sign.

Who for, is a good question.

He will most likely never contest another election. So who for? The answers lie about him. The problem could be there are too many, all of his own making. The Lalu household eddies with competing ambitions. Wife and former Bihar chief minister, Rabri Devi, may have publicly signed off the public stage, but three of the nine children – eldest daughter Misa, and sons Tej Pratap and Tejashwi – have all come up to the table, or been brought there courtesy little other than the happy accident of birth. Tejashwi, the youngest among them, has been anointed successor, but of the future who knows? The father’s mantle is well worth a grab, it is substantial even in its erosions. Lalu stands interned but that cannot mean Lalu’s politics is over. In 2015, two years after he had been stripped of the benefits of popular mandate and public office, he barnstormed Bihar and bagged the biggest kitty of seats in the assembly. He is for nobody to wish away; he remains an effervescence not entirely evaporated. There are far more parts to this man than have become the subject of adverse judicial pronouncement.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2018/01/04/laloo-yadav-burnished-and-tarnished/feed/6sankarshanthakurA General, and retired? Hoynaki?https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/12/26/a-general-and-retired-hoynaki/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/12/26/a-general-and-retired-hoynaki/#respondTue, 26 Dec 2017 12:41:23 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1125Continue reading A General, and retired? Hoynaki?]]>Old soldiers, it says in the Oxford Book of Idioms, or wherever else you look them up, never die. It has come to our notice, amid the tolling of alarm bells for those who choose to timely hear them, that of late they’ve also developed a tendency to refuse to fade away. Didn’t you hear of that Jarnail sitting across the fence in neighbouring Bakistan? Have you not made yourself fully aware of the dire peril we are faced with? Do you not lend your ear (and any other or all of your body parts should the need arise) to the DeeaahLeeder? Has nobody told you it is your national duty to pay heed, homage, attention, respect, obeisance, cess, surcharge, income tax, entertainment tax, goods and services tax, and sundry tributes?

Jaago Mohan Pyaare, the wanton delinquencies of NothingHappened are over, banished, like the thousand rupee note, by imperious decree. Wake up and prostrate yourself to new requirements, conform, don’t question. Are you anti-national? Those hostile Jarnails from across have hatched a dark plot and chickens haven’t emerged from it. Pigeons have. They are being sent across in daring droves, surveillance cams stitched into their wings, their feet strapped with sensors, their beaks ferrying sinister missives. Pigeons that fly in from the west don’t take off with olive branches. They’re olive green, OG in military parlance. And now they’re overhead, in a macabre flap of wings. All it took that Jarnail was a forefinger jab on Facebook: Post! Danger got deployed all over us. And you thought he was retired, that Jairnail, feeding benign birds in his aviary? Just because Mahadeb wasn’t at his appointed station to confirm the peril to you over your morning tumbler of tea? HoyNaKi? (Which in other geographies would translate to either convey utter astonishment or the sense that what’s been posited is unacceptable.) You don’t believe the DeeaahLeeder? HoyNaKi?

Jarnails across that cantankerous concertina fence are scary creatures. They are men of stealth and sleight. They can accompany a hunt for BadenBinLaden all the way to BoraTora when they’ve kept him safe and squirrelled in a mansion in ButButWhereAbad. They can depose prime ministers and then have them hanged on hessian. They instal prime ministers then exile them to RowdyMarebia. They force wars upon them, then leave them to the dogs when those wars are lost. They can take over planes and effect bloodless coups from flying cockpits. One of them exploded in a military plane and, in tattered departure, conspired to have his body parts carpet bomb Bakistan so utterly wholly, that his spectre still breathes and haunts the space. Dangerous folks, these Jarnails. It’s nothing short of suicidal to underplay, or worse, scoff at the peril they pose. Look, we’ve already been cautioned by TheAuthority that one of them Jarnails has his finger on the Facebook button, which is a little more portentous than a nuclear button because once pressed, it takes not one destination, or two, but this whole planet with explosion. Catastrophe looms overhead.

No wonder, and quite in the rightness of things, NumberToo has been uttering nervous somethings to NumberOne, temporarily so named because he is suddenly a little unsure he is still NumberWon. A conversation snatched.NumberToo: “What’s one to do now, this threat from the Jarnails pushing buttons? Vikas-vikas won’t do, it doesn’t matter to them. And that MaunMaunSingh has suddenly found a tongue. He is jabbering away, conspiring with the enemy, leaking secrets, plotting our defeat. Remember him, Aaka? It’s that same MaunMaunSingh, the one who never won an election himself, that same man who never uttered a syllable! HoyNaKi? We need to do something. ChhappanChhuri, Aaka, that should be enough to neutralise them, no?”

NumberOne: “ChhappanChhuri? Are you kidding me now? Have you not heard of the doctrine of a thousand cuts, or did someone wipe that out by mistake when we ordered history air-brushed? A thousand cuts, they’ve threatened, and here you are trying to brandish ChhappanChhuri! It’s why they call you NumberToo.”

And while spews this awesome worry
Over and across the whole country
Mahadeb remains on some dark scurry
This absence, it is just not done; HoyNaKi?

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/12/26/a-general-and-retired-hoynaki/feed/0sankarshanthakurThe new, incomplete Thesaurus of Vikashttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/12/26/the-new-incomplete-thesaurus-of-vikas/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/12/26/the-new-incomplete-thesaurus-of-vikas/#respondTue, 26 Dec 2017 12:37:23 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1122Continue reading The new, incomplete Thesaurus of Vikas]]>Someone asked where is Vikas. Then someone replied Vikas has become the subject of a missing person report. Like Mahadeb. There’s more concern scudding about than just over Mahadeb. Are you listening, Mahadeb? You might be well advised to learn not everybody’s riveted on your absence, so if this disappearance is the collateral consequence of some attention deficit disorder you suffer from, end the charade. Come out of it. There are enough around your shack thirsting for tea, gaping morosely at shattered remains of the last bhaanrs you served out and which lie crushed so fully that they have begun to resemble the ego of a juggernaut that lost his jugger and had no option but to hold up the naut as prize. Meantime, the search for Vikas is on in earnest.

But it turns out that it’s a most malicious and malevolent canard that Vikas is missing, just the kind of spurious concoction that votaries of NothingHappened specialise in. Vikas is everywhere, perhaps you can’t see it, that’s your problem. You can’t see God, that cannot mean God isn’t there. God is everywhere. And so is Vikas.

You thought the naut was anything but the result of Vikas? Yes, the jugger was lost, but that was on account of the wicked conspiracies brokered between the forces of HAJistan and Bakistan by PappuPaasAaGaya and his lowly (also known as neech) agents. They were plotting in league with those retired Jarnails across the fence whose specialty it is to topple regimes. And it usually takes a conspiracy at the very least, which is what they had on the table that dark and secret dinner night. But that table has been turned and all has turned out well in the end. TheBossOfAllThings still wears the crown of naut and that is the gift of Vikas. Vikas has been the story since NothingHappened was banished.

Then notes were banished. DirtyMoney was banished. Cash vanished, and beggars bought POS tabs. The nation became the shape of a queue and began to trek towards Vikas, that many splendoured, omnipresent thing we have come to be blessed with. En route, we learnt many things about our real selves, and all of those were about Vikas.

For instance, if you wear a certain kind of headwear – just the kind that TheBossOfAllThings refuses to – you are likely to be mobbed, then possibly also lynched. Vikas. Or, in case you didn’t yet know, Ganesha was the construct of plastic surgery. Vikas. Maharana Pratap vanquished Jalaluddin Akbar at Haldighati, upon which Akbar retreated to Agra and tamely proceeded with the consolidation of the Mughal empire. Maharana Pratap, rooted ruler of the masses, celebrated his victory with chapatis made out of jungle grass. Vikas. The airbrushing of fraudulent history is a work in progress. We shall soon establish that the Taj Mahal is actually TejoMahal. Vikas. Meanwhile, the practice run on capturing domes (three were done in Ayodhya this month a quarter century ago) has resumed; a bhagwa was recently mounted atop a courthouse in Rajasthan. Vikas. We don’t need “their” votes. Vikas. We wear monogrammed pinstripes. Vikas. We change dresses every photo-op. Vikas. We have exchanged khadi for Fendi. Vikas. For the first time ever, an Indian hot air balloon rode piggy on a seaplane. Vikas. We have finally begun to openly deify the killer of the Mahatma. Vikas. We have acquired the capability to disguise MadeInChina as MakeInIndia. Vikas. We are going to run a bullet train so expensive its going to cost double the flight costs, but we can now afford it. Vikas. We have linked birth, death and everything in between to Aadhar. Vikas.

We will soon by law rob depositors of their life savings. Vikas.

We have the ability to shut and open Parliament as and when convenient. Vikas.

We have now achieved an Election Commission that listens and obeys. This happened briefly during NothingHappened as well, but now we have made victory of people’s will (which solely resides in TheBossOfAllThings) over such autonomies complete. Vikas. Actually, it is such a blessed thing TheMessiah finally arrived and revealed to us the truth about the derelictions of NothingHappened. That’s Vikas.

December 6th, 2017: Down one of several stone-flagged lanes that toddle off Marienplatz, Munich town hall plaza, there still operates a rather prosperous enterprise called the Hofbrauhaus. It’s one of several kindred addresses around the area pledged to the central Bavarian celebration – the ooze and oomph of beer. They are all, each one of them, establishments of gregarious hubbub – voluptuous symphonies bound about their high-arched halls, beermaids shuffle about the tables with their jugfuls, decanting foaming oceans of the house brew. The floors tinkle, with glass and unrestrained merriment.

Hofbrauhaus is one of them and a little apart. It is patronized for more than just its beer and knucklewurst. Hofbrauhaus is where Adolf Hitler made his first address to the Nazi party in 1920. Through the flaming decades that followed, Hofbrauhaus remained a celebration of Nazi ways and values, and that’s partly what gets Hofbrauhaus its bloated clientele today. It’s a slice of Hitler. But a forbidden slice. You’ll find no trace of him or his creed. Nobody so much as whispers Adolf on the precincts, god forbid Hitler, or actually German law. Germany has institutionalized provisions called Volksverhetzung, or incitement of hatred, which prohibit all Nazi symbols, totems, hate speech, incitement, anything that is a reminder of Hitler. It’s a custom strictly adhered to in Germany.

It comes from the fear and the determination of no repetitions.

It comes from regret that’s yet unrelieved.

Most of all, it comes from a deep and collective sense of shame at the unspeakable horrors Germany and Germans once feistily brought upon. Nie Wieder, never again.

Regret can relieve wrongdoing; it implies admission of turpitude and, more pertinently, an undertaking of corrections and probably also a pledge of no repetitions.

In the 25 years since Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid was razed, our discourse has been hauled in the opposite direction – from shuddering shame to the discarding of that shame and the adoption of audacities that undermine the fundamental underpinnings of India and its Constitution.

The grand temple hasn’t moved in that time; it remains a template that awaits turning tangible. It lies unformed among millions of bricks and unfinished masonry scattered across Ayodhya; it parades the courthouses trying to rid itself of legal tangles, yet unable to leap out of their grasp and become a physicality; it remains probably the most divisive and disruptive argument we’ve had with ourselves since Partition. What has come to calcify and claw its way to centre-stage during the past quarter century, though, is the idea that proposed the stunning violations of December 6, 1992.

That day was a lumpen blitz so stupefying, it took the highest advocates of the Ram temple by shock and awe. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, for the longest time the most presentable face of the sangh, scurried to label the wanton destruction a “misadventure” and a matter of “deep sorrow”. Lal Krishna Advani, the man who spotted a political harvest in the demon seed with diabolical cunning and who summoned that marauder tempest to Ayodhya, would call it the “saddest day of my life”. Even if they were keeping up appearances, they thought it necessary to keep them. What happened wasn’t right; what happened had, in the least, left them mortified. For all their diligent omissions and commissions, the demolition wasn’t the denouement they seemed to want to be part of – as if ghouls, the same ones they had urgently roused and beckoned, had suddenly turned to savage their script and blow the plot. They wanted discomfiture and remorse foregrounded. Ghouls can be tough to tackle, even if they are of your own making.

A good part of the reason why Advani is where he is today is that the grandmaster ghouls have arrived and they are unembarrassed of deed and purpose. The ruins of Ayodhya are no longer infamy that require forsaking, they are the stuff of bragging rights, an unabashed – and electorally empowered – dare: this is what was required to be done, this is what was done, so take it and move on. Mandir waheen banaayenge. They don’t do regret anymore; it’s an effete thing, it promotes confusion in the ranks and defeats purpose. More than a thousand people were killed in Gujarat in 2002 on the watch of the man who’d become prime minister. At one point on his cruise to power, he was asked if he regretted the blood-ridden platform of his ascent, and he looked philosophically in the distance and revealed the metaphor of his mind – if you’re driving somewhere and a puppy comes under the wheels, you do feel sorry. Gujarat 2002 lay succinctly summed up – a “kutte ka bachcha” died. Pogrom denial, just as there exists, in many places punishably, Holocaust denial.

The imaginings of the Ram temple project, to which the wrecking of the Babri Masjid was always a critical first step, have never been legal or judicial or constitutional. They’ve always been, in the understanding of those who framed and fanned the project, civilizational – a supremacist assertion that unashamedly glories in the frills of Nazi inspirations of race and nationhood. It is for them an issue of righting wrongs, a necessity of throwing off the chains of ‘slavery’ link by link. Be not persuaded, or deluded, that Ayodhya is the one and final tumult. Its logic is to proceed, and that procession lies vociferously promised – ” Abhi to pehli jhaanki hai, Mathura, Kashi baaki hai”. To those purposes there now exists an enabling and purposeful order, an undeclared new republic that did declare itself born in May 2014 after “hundreds of years of slavery”.

It is an institutional bigotry so resolute on refashioning this geography, it will recast history and its cast of characters if it has to. It is palpably comfortable with the deification of the murderer of Gandhi. One of the many forks in its tongue is happy, and permitted, to wag in advocacy of Nathuram Godse and his purpose. Off the record, it merrily winks at libellous portraitures of Jawaharlal Nehru – a chain-smoking wastrel who was born in a whorehouse, perished of syphilis and played playboy in between. For the record, it thinks nothing of pro-actively burying the work and legacy of the man who crafted the framework that gave reason for this most complex plurality to remain one nation, salute the same flag, sing the same anthem, together.

But this may be another country from that one. It is unrepentant, often celebratory, of rampant majoritarian excess. Its minders wear belligerent exclusionism as a badge – mind you, we do not need ‘their’ vote, they have been rendered politically irrelevant. They mindfully, and dangerously, exclude, barricade, stereotype, kill. There are, as the honourable junior Union minister for food processing, Niranjan Jyoti, reminded us, Ramzadas and H****zadas. But better still ” kutte ka bachcha”, it is so brutally effective.

This day, 25 years ago, K.K. Venugopal, counsel for the Uttar Pradesh government, stood before a Supreme Court bench, all his fervent pledges and undertakings torn to smithereens by the frenzy that had taken the Babri Masjid, and he submitted: “My lords, I hang my head in shame.”

It’s unlikely such penitence will come to be uttered today on behalf of the powers. There is a new regime, radically at variance with any other since 1947, and it has new purposes and requirements. Shame doesn’t figure.

There is nothing as loud as the sound of wrongdoing being hushed. Nor anything as revelatory as a cover-up. The more covers you commission and deploy the bigger the body of evidence becomes. The harder you hush over something, the more you are heard. Don’t believe me? Come spend a while at Mahadeb’s, even though he’s still gone. It’s come to matter less and less that he isn’t there. His air is. It’s a place that all winds cross, and on their wings arrive intimations.

Someone died. Someone important. Someone sitting over an important matter – as important as possible murder. Then it began to dawn that he may not have died. He may have himself been murdered. Everybody’s talking about it at Mahadeb’s: Did you know? But didn’t you? But, hush, nobody’s naming names because UnmentionablePeople may be involved. UnmentionablePeople meaning mention them and, well, you don’t wish unmentionable things happening to you, do you? See how careful I am being. Learn. And please take due note, PuppyLove and NumberToo, I have not named any names. I am a careful character, clean as a barrel after bullets have been shot into intended places.

Termites, we’ve been famously commanded, must be exterminated. We do well at terminating. We are used to murder, why fuss over it? Giant trees fall. Newton’s Third Law takes a grip on emotion. Retribution becomes just, incumbent. When the glare catches us red-handed, we wipe our sins on others and melt into the vast convenience of numbers.

Many winters ago, I found myself in a village called Logain, deep in the Bihar countryside. Somebody had mentioned murder. It was eventually left to the vultures to rip the cover. The bodies, 116 of them, had lain there decomposing for six weeks. In that period the village had grown wiser to fineries of tilling – dead people make good compost. A lush crop of mustard had sprung on the bed of corpses. But the village was also to grow wiser to a thing or two about old idioms: dead men do tell tales, it is seldom they don’t. The stench had risen high off the field and the vultures had begun to swoop low. Their common guilt the villagers had consigned to a common grave. The carnage was an open secret in the village; to the world beyond it was just a secret. Until the vultures arrived, followed by that rare thing called a policeman with a conscience. He had the crop shaved and the field dug up. The skulls flew into the sky as the spades got to work… Some among us were there and told the story. Logain became like many of our stories, the child of memory’s whore – an unwanted, forgotten consequence of collective shame. We are a nation eddying with bastard deeds.

We let blood litter our streets and retreat into our homes. Nobody owns up. We decamp from facts and populate our horrors with clichéd characters of fiction – a violent mob, a murderous horde, a mass that suddenly descended and vanished. Who? Wherefrom? Us. Herefrom. Every single time. It is we who pillage, rape and murder under wrongful incitement and exhortation. Under criminal instruction and protection. There are leaders but we are there to be led. We are the midwives of the abortion of the senses. Then we wash our hands and line up for secular prabhat pheris, our opaque monuments to Gandhi and Buddha urgently recalled to veil memory and guilt.

We need to ask a few questions of each other. We cannot pretend being a civil society when we claim every now and again rights over uncivil liberties. We cannot invoke laws that we ourselves violate. We cannot look up to a Constitution that we trample underfoot. There are a myriad contemporary Indian stories we have forgotten. They are all true stories. They have dates and datelines. They have pegs and dead people hanging by them. And there are among us, the many hands that hung them there, that have since been washed in collective and convenient forgetting. The truth about mass murder in this country we haven’t learnt to tell. Individuals murdered? Puppy love.

With a manic prescription and a febrile bloodcry
Will arrive again that diabolical sloganeer
Don’t then begin cry oh-my, oh-my, oh-my!
Of sinful deed of blood and murder, you are the pioneer.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/12/05/remember-dead-men-do-tell-tales/feed/0sankarshanthakurAnything goes, everything is historyhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/29/anything-goes-everything-is-history/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/29/anything-goes-everything-is-history/#respondWed, 29 Nov 2017 08:29:59 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1112Continue reading Anything goes, everything is history]]>Mahadeb is not a historical character, at least not yet. Don’t assume his absence for permanence. He’s gone, but he isn’t history yet. One day, inevitably he will be, but that will be another day. Everything becomes history, even iPhones. A time will come when that time will be gone.

So will Mahadeb be one day. History. He is, and therefore he won’t be. Am I overstating myself? I would think not. For even what’s not history is becoming history. As Jalaluddin Akbar’s defeat at the hands of Maharana Pratap at Haldighati. As Akbar’s rollicking love for a void called Jodha. Or the raging Khilji obsession with Padmini, neither princess nor Rajasthani nor Rajput, but the caprice of an inventive poet scribbling away at a fair remove in Jais, Rae Bareli, Uttar Pradesh. Malik Mohammed Jayasi was real enough, but he wrote unreal things. He was no historian. He’s only making history as we go along.

Who is she,
This Rashtramata,
And if she is she,
Then who art thou, O, Bharatmata?

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/29/anything-goes-everything-is-history/feed/0sankarshanthakurValley Voiceshttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/18/valley-voices/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/18/valley-voices/#respondSat, 18 Nov 2017 09:00:52 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1101Continue reading Valley Voices]]>Last fortnight, I spent some time in Kashmir, trying to sample opinion on the Centre’s new effort to open dialogue.

Dineshwar Sharma landed here last week as a text message. A couple of days before New Delhi’s newest emissary to Kashmir presented his person to the Valley, telephones of local notables began to simultaneously ping – mainstream and separatist politicians, opinion leaders in the media, academia and the bar, hand-picked retired civil servants, all from a list of numbers that Sharma had been handed. ‘Could we meet? Want to talk? I’m coming,’ is how Sharma was sounding out his target audience.

The response he received was, to put it mildly, lukewarm, especially insufficient in dropping early winter temperatures. Separatists rejected the overture out of hand; mainstream entities like Omar Abdullah of the National Conference showed little eagerness, settling down for a ‘private call on’ only because Sharma had gone knocking his door; among others in the intelligentsia, few obliged, opting to sense the depth and drift of Sharma’s enterprise before they revealed their minds. Those that arrived at his heavily secured VVIP perch at Hari Niwas – many dozen delegations, authentic and adulterated – had mostly been herded and nudged to Sharma’s presence by administrative fiat. On the eve of Sharma’s arrival, the office of Divisional Commissioner Basheer Khan, occupied itself shooting off directives to any outfit worth the name to present themselves to Sharma – Bakerwal and Gujjar tribesmen, boatmen, tour operators, hoteliers, motley sets of tillers, women’s and youth groups, government-funded NGOs, even a dubious crew of young journalists nobody seemed to know existed. As Sharma laboured on in his exclusive bungalow, trying to shore up respectable numbers of the interested, The Telegraph spoke to a cross-section of those not on his telephone log – young unaligned professionals who remain invested in Kashmir and count among stakeholders as any other. This is what they had to say on New Delhi’s latest venture:

Rashid Rather, Sociologist: Kashmiris love talking, we’ve been talking since 1947. The issue is what about. To me the problem here is not about how to deal with separatists, it is how Delhi has dealt with mainstream parties, right from Sheikh Abdullah to Farooq Abdullah to the present generation of leaders. They have been pressed to the wall. Delhi has failed the Kashmiri mainstream consistently, it was made to fail before the Kashmiri people to a point that it had no credibility left. From Indira Gandhi to Rajiv to P.V. Narasimha Rao to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, everybody made promises and turned on them. That is what has created the space for separatists. There were always separatist pockets here, but they were pockets. New Delhi-inspired failures of the mainstream have expanded the separatist constituency. My message to New Delhi is: don’t be bothered about separatists, look at how you have treated the mainstream, how you have manipulated and emaciated it. But they are not prepared to learn any lessons, they are going on repeating the same mistakes. They have played with the mainstream leadership. Such a record inspires no confidence in us. The new emissary has met many so-called delegations, nearly 40 in two days, but is this a railway platform? What is he trying to do meeting so many delegations in such a short time? Are we to take this seriously? It has become a joke. Please do not come to Kashmir without examining your own record, it will serve no purpose. Go back, introspect and if you realise you’ve made mistakes, a start can probably be made.

Haroon Lone, Blogger: This is a nonsense effort, an insult to Kashmiris. It makes no sense to open doors to Dineshwar Sharma when so many previous interlocutor efforts have come to nothing. Only collaborators of the Indian state will meet him and that will serve no purpose. India is not interested in addressing the core issue of Kashmiri self-determination. And then they send a man with an IB background to talk. How can we trust him, open ourselves to such a man? The IB and Indian security agencies are tormentors of Kashmiri people. Indians fought and secured freedom from the British, but they are not prepared to countenance if Kashmiris are waging the same struggle for themselves. The Indian state has crushed us, Indian civil society has betrayed us by not standing by what is the democratic right of any people: the right to decide their own fate. You aren’t prepared to grant us autonomy when we want something fundamentally greater. What’s the point of such an exercise? You crush and humiliate us daily, then you send a policeman and want us to talk to him? This is insult on injury. How do you expect me to talk to my oppressor on his terms? I have an aspiration and I well know that if I express it to you, I will be punished in the harshest manner.

Shahbaz Sikandar Mir, Lawyer: Our past experience with interlocutors holds out no hope. Were I to tell Dineshwar Sharma one thing, it would be this: Don’t sit in a secured bungalow and ask for people to present themselves, strike out and meet Kashmiris on the ground, show heart and confidence in the people you call your own. There is a dangerous vacuum in Kashmir, any effort has to infuse the sense in people that someone is truly trying in their interest. There is no point if conversations do not go to the ground, to the villages and hamlets, to far districts, to disturbed pockets. The young in Kashmir are more alienated than ever before, they are angry too. I would even say that at the moment, the situation here is not ripe enough for an outreach of the kind I want to happen. Sometimes, I feel there is no hope left, that the gulf between governments and the people is too huge to bridge. That is not an unreasonable feeling. Leaders cannot step into their own villages and constituencies; that’s cause for alarm, this fracture in communication. If New Delhi is at all serious, and I seriously doubt it is, it must attempt fundamental corrections in the way it treats the people of Kashmir. It must inspire confidence. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening. If you want to create a debate on Article 370 and 35A, if the very mention of autonomy irritates you, it’s a bad sign. This is just how to lose the confidence of Kashmiris even more completely.

Nausheen Fatima, Doctoral scholar: This isn’t the first representative that New Delhi has sent to Kashmir, and it is a matter of disappointment to us that previous efforts, good, bad, indifferent, have come to nothing. I cannot say this effort inspires any confidence in me. But even so, I am one of those who would like to engage. I say this because if we refuse to talk we will be guilty of not pursuing our own goals. If we are a democracy, we cannot refuse dialogue. If Kashmir is a dispute, we are a party to it, the onus is on us to participate in any exercise aimed at resolutions. We represent the will of the people, the government has a responsibility towards us. We need to tell New Delhi it has to respect the Constitution, it has to assure us on fundamentals like Article 370 and 35A, it has to look at autonomy seriously. It is what our contract says. Violence will take us nowhere, not talking is not an option. We have to be pragmatic and firm about what our rights and aspirations are and continue telling New Delhi that we are unhappy to have been denied what we were promised.

Ejaz Ashraf Wani, Political Scientist: We have seen enough. Talking is important, but with who and what about? You cannot be skirting around core issues and key people all the time. Talking to show the world you are talking makes no sense. I cannot make a difference to the problems here because I am of little consequence to public opinion. But some people can, I mean the Hurriyat and separatist sections. They need to be somehow involved if this has to have any meaning. Issuing a general invitation is not good enough. Efforts have to be made to get people who have a problem with India to the negotiating table. For that New Delhi has to demonstrate genuine intent. If New Delhi isn’t prepared to talk to Pakistan, to separatists, to all stakeholders, we will get nowhere. The very point of negotiating is that there will be counter-voices, New Delhi has to be prepared to hear them out. Dineshwar Sharma has been meeting delegations of tradesmen and tribes and tourist operators. But Kashmir is not a municipal problem, it is a political problem. What is Sharma’s brief? There is an elected government here which should be looking after the issues of traders and tourist operators. Theoretically, he is only undermining the government if he is meeting these delegations. Sharma has not come with any proposals, what are we to talk about? Frankly, I do not see any genuine effort, this is only more reason for us to remain pessimistic. That’s sad.

Shahana, Sports writer, Entrepreneur: I am not into big words and big solutions. I advocate small but meaningful steps that will make a difference to the lives of people. But that’s not happening. What’s happening is words like azaadi and autonomy are being tossed about, which have no real import on our lives. Why is there not the smallest effort to speak to militants, persuade them to another life, rehabilitate them honourably in society? Why does nobody speak to their parents and assure them a good deal from the government? Why does nobody in the government reach out to young stone-pelters and counsel them? Over the years, we have become a deeply injured and brutalised people, we need a patient ear, we need sympathy, we need concrete alternatives for the future that we can be interested in. Is there such a plan with anyone? I cannot see it. I only see political games and slogan-mongering which will come to nothing.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/18/valley-voices/feed/0sankarshanthakurTo the gas chamber, you termitehttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/12/to-the-gas-chamber-you-termite/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/12/to-the-gas-chamber-you-termite/#respondSun, 12 Nov 2017 06:58:33 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1099Continue reading To the gas chamber, you termite]]>Not everything can be about Mahadeb. Not when he has forsaken his calling, left his votaries forlorn and proceeded on furlough with no forwarding address or the faintest idea with anybody on when he may return. If that. Chaiwalas can’t do that. There are obligations that come with the job. Look at other chaiwalas, or The Chaiwala. Does he leave your side even when you might want him to? Never. He is there, at the throw of the television switch, harnessed live to cause and country, relentlessly serving chai. In the process, serving the nation.

Mahadeb has behaved badly. But while he is missing, we shan’t remain in unanimated suspension around the void he’s left behind. Attached to his bereft cart, after all, is a whole nation lumbering under the rank deficits of NothingHappened. The situation’s worse; we are beset by catastrophic prospects. Correction is required, we need to move. Nothing needs to be replaced with Something. NewIndia’s calling. And thank heavens there’s somebody heeding that call with all the urgency and innovation it requires, laying out the road ahead, picking out the pitfalls.

What would have become of us if we hadn’t been recently alerted to the rife and fatal perils of termites?

Nobody bothered warning us all this while what an apocalyptic end termites have been plotting. We are teetering on a hollowed out precipice and nobody told us. Such were the reckless botch-ups of the epoch justly called NothingHappened. All through NothingHappened, termites happened, and they were allowed to continue happening. As their nomenclature vaguely suggests, termites terminate. We were being voraciously had. But since we have given unto ourselves TheBossOfAllThings, he’s given unto us reason to feel secure. He’s let out the war cry: Exterminate before they terminate.

This is nothing to scoff at. We should feel indebted we are now sagaciously helmed. Examine the scholarship and thought, not to speak of the milk of national interest that began to flow Circa 2014, that has gone into raising this life-saver alarm. Examine termites. Their names are petrifying enough. Cratomastotermitidae. Mastotermitidae. Archotermopsidae. Hodotermitidae. Stolotermitidae. Kalotermitidae. Archeorhinotermitidae. Stylotermitidae. Rhinotermitidae. Serritermitidae. Termitidae. Imagine running into one or any in a dark alley. Plundered to the bone, Ram naam satya hai. It gets worse.

They come in 3,016 species. And that’s how far we know. A few hundred more termite varieties remain beyond our grasp. They are Jurassic or Triassic of origin, whatever that might mean; Hollywood tells us that can be unimaginably old and terrifying. We know social and anti-social behaviour. This lot conforms to an altogether alien behavioural tendency – they are eusocial, a matrix so arcane we have no understanding of it. It gets even worse.

Termites organise themselves into armies, male and female. Armies. And these armies are so resilient and invasive, so tough to control, the best zoos in the world have refused to host them. But that’s how they’ve come to colonise every landmass on our planet other than Antarctica. And the way science is exploding frontiers, it’s quite certain it will discover an Antarctic termite soon, genetically kitted out in white thermals, breathing brimstone to neutralise polar frost. Termites are not a hazard to us alone, they are a global jeopardy. And it was down to one man to flag this menace to humanity. Is there more proof required to confirm we are now blessed with a world-class leader?

Doubly blessed be his name, TheBossOfAllThings can do better than merely cry TERMITE! He has remedies at beck and call. Don’t we know how proficient NumberToo is at this business of exterminating? Give him a removal job and he removes without trace. When TheBossOfAll-Things commands, NumberToo complies. Exterminate! Extermination executed. This job can’t be entrusted to novices. The very superiority of our race is under threat from those irrepressibly multiplying zillions that wouldn’t even brook family planning. It’s now or never. It has to be our might or the termite. Exterminate, or be exterminated. In such a black and white world of choices has Mahadeb chosen to go grey of existence.

But I don’t care that I lie,
Or what offence I give;
I say just happily let die
So the superior we may live.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/12/to-the-gas-chamber-you-termite/feed/0sankarshanthakurThe mimic has now gone missinghttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/06/the-mimic-has-now-gone-missing/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/06/the-mimic-has-now-gone-missing/#respondMon, 06 Nov 2017 11:09:24 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1096Continue reading The mimic has now gone missing]]>An anxiety beginning to mount, like the cash-machine lines of yester. A shiver having trespassed time and arrived out of turn, this nowhere season ahead of winter, this Dreiserene interregnum between glare and gloom. That shiver then having crept up the spine like poison ivy on wet ventrals and turned the insistent shape of a question: Where’s Mahadeb?

Mahadeb having been gone an inexplicably long while by now. So long his signature has become a void. The holes on his leftover lungi having turned imperially expansionist and claimed the whole of it, the tatters having turned to bare thread and dropped, like expiring worms, onto his cold forsaken hearth. The coals in it having turned to ash, the ash having been cajoled by kindred elements to become its destined part – ash unto ash, the final truth. Also known as the heartily consumed tip of my cigarette.

But that’s indulgence; it’s up to nothing. It’s no help to this untimely and uncontainable anxiety, beginning to mount, cold and forlorn as Fujiyama. Where’s Mahadeb, the long and inexplicably gone one? Where, more pertinently, is Mahadeb’s tea, Mahadeb be damned. The loyal votaries wondered long. They waited long. Then said so long. They forgot the taste of tea and took to coffee. Off mechanised vends; frothy on promise, watery on delivery. But how long were they to wait? Nobody waits upon another too long, they proceed to other things – the intermediate truth. Also known as the cigarette after this one’s turned to ash and been flicked.

None of that has yet brought us any closer to the issue of the immediate truth: Where’s Mahadeb? Has be been taken off air? But that cannot be because Mahadeb was never on air. Not radio, not television. Not Facebook, not Twitter, not WhatsApp, not PeriscopeLive, none of that virtual air we breathe to be the oxygen of our lives, banish the thought. Mahadeb cannot be taken off air, whatever his sin. And if indeed that’s the case we must assume far worse than what we do when we learn so-and-Rangeela-so has been taken off air. Taken off air in Mahadeb’s case would mean taken off essential supplies. The noose. Finito. Kaput. Or however you put it in the language NumberToo uses to report to TheBoss-OfAllThings, but which is not fit to print here.

It turns out Mahadeb has rendered himself guilty of a grievous, and utterly punishable, offence. He has been mimicking. And mimicking in a street as broad as daylight for personal profit. He’s been serving tea. Now who does that without causing unholy offence? Who in their right mind can be so anti-nationally heretical as to mimick TheBossOfAllThings who patented TheChaiwala trademark about the time he triumphally led NewIndia to Independence from the epochal deficits of NothingHappened Circa 2014? Serving tea is a dastardly lampoon act. Unpardonable. Now, they did use to say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but that rested with such offending jailbirds as Oscar Wilde and was happily buried on the cusp between NothingHappened and NewIndia. You mimic; you suffer. Our forefathers left unto us the warning fable of the monkey that recklessly copied his master. One day, he picked up the razor and began to shave and left his face pitilessly bloodied. That’s what comes of mimicking.

If he’s fortunate, there stands a slim chance that the saviour clause called benefit of doubt can apply here because it is possible Mahadeb came into felony in the bliss of ignorance. He’s oblivious of news, which may be an offence in itself. But a case may yet be argued. He’s not knowingly sinned. I haven’t in all my years, heard him address any collective as “Mitron” or “Bhaaiyon-Behnon”; he never turned up on his stove dressed in Gucci or Armani or Fendi, he committed no such offendi; he never took orders glaring down at clients on a Bvlgari nose-bridge; he never thought to stride out in a pistachio kurta buckled under a champagne-pink bandi. No. Never. For him only the vest yellowed by the smoke of his labours and the lungi monogrammed with holes. And now even the lungi’s gone. As, alas, is Mahadeb.

But grieve not too much
If you haven’t a dear soul seen
Have it, and do to faith clutch
For this is only a long Halloween.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/11/06/the-mimic-has-now-gone-missing/feed/0sankarshanthakurI, PROMISCUOUS Power and the Improbable Amorality of Nitish Kumarhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/i-promiscuous-power-and-the-improbable-amorality-of-nitish-kumar/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/i-promiscuous-power-and-the-improbable-amorality-of-nitish-kumar/#respondSun, 29 Oct 2017 10:03:09 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1092Continue reading I, PROMISCUOUS Power and the Improbable Amorality of Nitish Kumar]]>My take on Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s turncoat vault back into the lap of the BJPNitish Kumar on top of the Taxila ruins in Pakistan in 2012. Photo by Sankarshan Thakur.

His first chosen partner was, believe you me, the CPI(ML). His current chosen partner is a BJP as approximate to the RSS as it can get. Between them, Nitish Kumar has run the entire political spectrum, picking this one, ditching that one, in the pursuit and possession of power – from the provincial rogue called the Bihar People’s Party to national players like the Congress and the Left, each seduced at one time or another to afford him his embrace of the chair.

Nitish’s record of serial dalliance and ditchery springs from good reason, though. For, if power has been the central theme of Nitish’s career, the inability to secure it on his own is its central truth. Astounding as it may sound, the man who is in his third successive term as chief minister and who for a good while fancied himself as prime minister in waiting, has never won his home state singly. At his best he never had enough to propel him anywhere close to office; 17 per cent, never more. He needed booster feeds, he always needed an ally. Not a fanciful token as the CPI(ML) in 1995 – that effort fetched him the princely Assembly tally of seven of 324 seats in pre-Jharkhand Bihar – but a significant, bankable one.

He found not one but two.

Both would be handed good reason, at different junctures, to believe our chosen headline sits aptly on the man. For he has, at different junctures, found reason to kiss, then kick both.

It’s fair to reckon he’s not done with them yet; nor they with him. The guillotine-drop on Lalu Prasad mid-week and the immediate garlanding of Narendra Modi is by no means the last that’s been heard of Nitish Kumar in their annals. Not too far ago in the past, it was Modi under Nitish’s guillotine-drop, and Lalu the one getting the garland. There are scores here that await settlement.

The call of conscience is never a poor thing to possess; but it serves infinitely better to possess a conscience on call. Ask Nitish Kumar. It intones to him at various times varied wisdoms and fetches him the convictions convenient to his central purpose – ” Satta prapt karoonga, by hook or by crook, lekin satta leke achchha kaam karoonga… I will take power, by hook or by crook, but having got it, will do good work.” That’s the rash promise he made to himself in his fledgling years of public life. That’s what he’s single-mindedly, and often very cynically, worked to give the truth to. Nothing can take away from Nitish Kumar the overdue governance corrections he wrought upon the bleak deficits of Lalu raj. Beginning 2005, Bihar began to witness a turnaround in its affairs that it had forsaken all hope for. But sattaclearly takes precedence, whatever it takes – fib, falsehood, cunning, craftiness, deceit, subterfuge, fraud, saam, daam, dand, bhed. His ends have always justified the means to Nitish.

Two slices from his life and times thus far probably serve to illustrate when convictions come to drop upon Nitish Kumar and how and why they fade away. They concern the two men he has dumped and picked by turns.

The first is a scene from 1992. Bihar Bhawan, New Delhi. Lalu is visiting as chief minister. Nitish, recently rendered out of a job because of the demise of the V.P. Singh government, is biding his time in Delhi, waiting for opportunities to make himself relevant. He leads a motley group of colleagues from what was then the Janata Dal to Lalu’s suite. Farmers have been agitating in central Bihar, Nitish wants their demands addressed. None of those present quite recalls how, but within minutes of their entering, the meeting explodes into a raucous exchange of expletives. Fisticuffs follow. Lalu is screaming the loudest of all. ” Nikal baahar, nikal, baahar nikal, saa..a… get out, get the hell out, you rascals!” Commotion booms around the ground floor arc of Bihar Bhawan’s VVIP corridor. Abuse is flying about. Lalu is heard summoning security: “Get hold of this lot and drag them out of here, right out of here…” Soon enough, Lalu’s visitors are thrown out, his doors bang shut. As they leave Bihar Bhawan, shaken, Nitish mutters to one of his colleagues: “Ab iss aadmi ke saath kaam karna asambhav ho gaya hai… It has now become impossible to work with this man.” Later in the day, he scripts a long and angry letter, part of which lies documented even today. It’s an unambiguous declaration of parting – “…it is my considered view that it is of no use to be with you now, in such circumstances it is best that I conduct my politics removed from you…”

Nitish went on to formally split away from the Janata Dal and take up arms against Lalu. He was among the original petitioners to seek probe into the fodder scam. He was the one to coin the “jungle raj” slogan. He it was who led the “Lalu hatao, Bihar bachao” campaign and he who eventually unseated Lalu in 2005.

A decade later, in the summer of 2015, he wooed Lalu into an SOS alliance against Narendra Modi. His conscience had called and told him this had to be done for the sake of the “idea of India”.

The second is an episode from the Lok Sabha campaign of 2009. Nitish is chief minister of Bihar and one of the key constituents of the NDA. L.K. Advani is leading the campaign and one of the biggest shows is to be staged at Ludhiana, courtesy the Akalis. Invitations have gone out to leaders of all constituent parties. But Nitish is reluctant to go. The reason: he does not want to share the stage with Narendra Modi, then his Gujarat counterpart. He requests his party president, Sharad Yadav, to go instead. But a couple of days before the rally, Arun Jaitley calls Nitish with a personal request from Advani. Nitish does not commit himself immediately. But Advani presses on and eventually he relents. The deal is he’ll make a short and clinical appearance, just to keep Advani’s request. He flies into Chandigarh from Patna on a chartered aircraft and takes a car to Ludhiana. He has for company Sanjay Jha, a Jaitley acolyte who has begun to liaison between the JDU and BJP and who Nitish has grown very fond of. The Akalis have planned the Ludhiana rally Punjabi-style – a big, boisterous affair with drums beating, swords ceremonially flashing, bhangra troupes flexing about. Nitish is probably too taken by the merry commotion to see the prospect he most feared hotfooting it in his direction. He has barely set foot on the crowded podium when Narendra Modi scampers down to him from the far end and holds his hand aloft for the entire crowd to see.

A cheer goes up, that must have, at the time, buzzed like an irritable fly in Nitish’s ears. Cameras pop and Nitish feels like he has been shot. It is all over in a trice. Before Nitish has recovered his wits, Modi has left him and retreated to his appointed place. When Nitish gets back into the car with Sanjay Jha, he lavishes him with a hot mouthful. He is fuming. He says: ” Isiliye yahan laaye thhe? Aap jaante thhe kya hone waala hai, provoke kiya gaya hai mujhe aur aapne mujhe phansaaya… Is this why you brought me here? You knew this was going to happen. I have been provoked and you snared me here for this.” Jha tries stuttering an explanation, if only to pacify Nitish, but Nitish is in no mood to listen. ” Sab deliberate hai, design hai, kal akhbar mein wohi photo chhapega jo uss aadmi ne mera haath pakadke zabardasti khichwaya. Iss tarah ki rajneeti ke main sakht khilaaf hoon… All of this is deliberate, part of a design. Tomorrow’s newspapers will carry the very picture which that man forcefully held my hand for. I am strongly opposed to politics of this kind…” Sanjay Jha is stunned; he hasn’t yet realised the depth of Nitish’s aversion towards Modi. When the photograph is front-paged across the dailies the next morning, Jha tells himself he may have made a mistake.

What follows soon after is a spilling out of the Nitish-Modi feud. Modi arrives in Patna in June 2010 for the party’s national executive advertising his Rs 5 crore aid to Bihar for flood relief. Nitish is furious beyond measure. ” Yeh kaisi sabhyata hai, daan dekar koi usko vigyapit karta hai? Yeh Bihar ka apmaan hai… What kind of culture is this, does a donor advertise his donation? This is an insult to Bihar.” He makes a public point of scrapping his dinner invitation to the arrived BJP brass. He later makes peace with the party, but his war with Modi simmers on. In June 2013, as Modi’s candidacy for prime ministership becomes imminent, he junks the BJP. ” Rajneeti mein kuchh cheezen satta aur sarkar se upar hoti hain… There are some things in politics that are above power and government,” he proclaims, and says of Modi: “Iss insaan ka naam sunkey desh ke kadodon alp sankhyakon mein bhay or sandeh ka mahaul ban jata hai. Iss aadmi ke saath samjhauta nahin ho sakta… This man’s name invokes fear and suspicion in the millions of minorities of this country. There can be no compromise with this man.”

Four years later, or earlier this week, Nitish dissolved his reservations over Modi and thanked him profusely for agreeing to support him as partner in power. His conscience had called, he said, and told him he could not go on working with Lalu anymore.

What a wondrous beast of bidding a conscience on call is.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/i-promiscuous-power-and-the-improbable-amorality-of-nitish-kumar/feed/0sankarshanthakurA lungi and a monogram of holeshttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/a-lungi-and-a-monogram-of-holes/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/a-lungi-and-a-monogram-of-holes/#respondSun, 29 Oct 2017 09:26:33 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1084Continue reading A lungi and a monogram of holes]]>Not everyone reports to work each day of the week. The sun does, and sundry others do. Mistake. Hold yourselves, trolls, wait a moment before you slay me on your keyboards and earn your daily pay. It wasn’t me, just cussed auto-correct. That should read The SundryOther, there’s only one that reports to work each day other than the sun. And that’s not a brag, Ramkasam no; it’s a fact notarised each day on the national register, previously known as television. There is the odd day the screen falls silent and bereft and you begin to fear the world’s going upside up again, but then there’s also the odd day of eclipse caused by cloud or lunatic concatenation. Doesn’t mean the sun isn’t there. So fear not that dull day on television, SundryOther is somewhere or other at work and the world remains assuredly upside down.

It just won’t do, not reporting to work each day, after decade upon disastrous decade of NothingHappened. Lights! Action! And please keep the cameras at ready. NewIndia has deep deficits to overcome. But Mahadeb won’t listen. Now and again, taken by bouts nothing short of anti-national, he vanishes. He jolts NewIndia. He triggers punishable lapses into NothingHappened. It’s unpardonable recklessness on his part to believe he’ll be gone from station and it will still be business as usual. Agreed, Mahadeb is not the only chaiwalaaround, but he is a chaiwala who still serves chai. Sundry others have stopped and moved on to serving entire nations. Now nations don’t come in bhaanrs; even if they did that would be a terribly impolite thing to try to achieve, you wouldn’t tell the nation ” bhaanr mein jaao“, would you?

That’s what Mahadeb refuses to understand. His companero of yore has come to embrace obligations so lofty and complex we can’t begin to comprehend. Try this some day that you feel bright and eager. Try Patel multiplied by Republican minus Russia multiplied by Caucasian divided by Dalit multiplied by the PLA multiplied by Arab minus Sunni minus Pakistani plus Balochistan to the variable power of GST divided twice over by the maximum speed of the BulletTrain and the minimum number of votes that could be cast in Kashmir in 2019, or as and when elections can credibly be held in that “war-like zone”. There. That’s how byzantine the wake-up log is for SundryOther each morning; and each morning he’s at it. Mahadeb leaves a far simpler situation vacant and renders things pitifully complicated. I mean the nation needs a chaiwala who still serves chai; chai is what fuels days. Nights we can rely on the ageing monk, or take ourselves in the blacken direction we are all headed – to the dogs. Tough to tell if Mahadeb heads that way too, for he never bothers with a forwarding address while gone.

He does worse. He leaves behind, flapping on a distended wire pulled across his ramshackle kiosk, his pinstriped lungi. The initiated can translate it into tactile tongue. It means “gone”; and when it continues there overnight, flopped on the wire and dry as wrinkles, it begins to exude more elaborate meanings – “Don’t know when I’m back, if that…” That’s bad enough, but what’s worse is his departure signage. A lungi? Nobody’s expecting a monogrammed pinstripe such as the one a certain personage once, only just that once, donned and swiftly shunned because it began to remind too many of the scary-tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The nation learned only later that the monogrammed pinstripe was a shoddy conspiracy commissioned by envious enemies and made to masquerade on the world stage as style statement. No sooner had the pernicious plot been bared than summary dismissal was pronounced on the the offending suit – off to the auctionhouse!

It found a fast and fervent buyer. When you’re Marilyn Monroe, or thereabouts of voltage, they’d quarrel to the gavel over your pettiest garment put through the most unmentionable disbursements of the body. Mahadeb, scrawny, myopic and fortunate if he takes up 56 inches from balding head to workman’s toe, is lower on voltage than he can sometimes be on attendance. It’s audacity redoubled to not report and plant instead a pinstripe monogrammed with holes.

Listen all to the manner born,
Claim it, even the wind wouldn’t do;
What’s pitted and torn,
It usually just blows through.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/a-lungi-and-a-monogram-of-holes/feed/0sankarshanthakurMy chaiwala and Our Chaiwalahttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/my-chaiwala-and-our-chaiwala/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2017/10/29/my-chaiwala-and-our-chaiwala/#respondSun, 29 Oct 2017 09:21:19 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1082Continue reading My chaiwala and Our Chaiwala]]>Every once in a way I feel the need for a little bit of Mahadeb. Just a little bit, no more than what, if we are still allowed the use of imagination without violating the law (or the sanctioned lawless), could have been at a certain hour a vodka shot. But for the hours that he has it on offer, Mahadeb’s stuff can be no less stimulating. It helps that he hasn’t yet banished puffs of nicotine from floating about him.

Wellbeing tyrants would better know what that does to the body, but what my soul wants I want to know best: it needs, every once in a way, a Mahadeb break.

Mahadeb serves out off-the-coals tea in bhaanrs, which in other geographies some may recognise as tiny earthen tumblers; he’s a chaiwala. That can be a famed and fortunate thing to be. Chaiwalas go far. Or some do. Or one did. That one isn’t Mahadeb.

Mahadeb made critical career errors, not that he appears to terribly care. He never wrestled alligators as a child. He didn’t climb three-fourths of the way up Mt Everest’s torso wearing slippers. He didn’t feed soldiers departing to blow the Chinese off our frozen frontiers. The 56-inch claim that is Mahadeb’s to make is that he is probably that high sans shoes that he doesn’t anyway possess. He didn’t lead the Indepen-dence struggle of NewIndia after sixty years of NothingHappened. He never did his mentors the necessary pupil duty of relieving them of the burdens of such nettle-ridden things as crowns; or of easing them into protectively mothballed duvet-comforts so their late life turned a calm and restful place, unvisited by the exhausting demands of office, or the ambition of someday having to achieve it. He can’t be bothered inventing new charms – or dares – to seduce television each day. Mahadeb has never ever been on television. You ought to understand you are nobody if you are not on television. Mahadeb is less than a nobody. He’s not on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, Periscope, SnapChat, Telegram, LinkedIn, nowhere. Is Orkut still around? Mahadeb was never on Orkut either. The only platform he is on is a knocked-up tin and timber kiosk grouted into the pavement. Chaiwalas have gone far but Mahadeb isn’t going anywhere; he’s a goner.

I’ve often wondered if Mahadeb knows that more famous peddler of his trade – The Chaiwala. But what a daft wonderment that is. About as daft as wondering whether The Chaiwala knows Mahadeb. Of course he doesn’t, Mahadeb’s a nobody. And of course Mahadeb knows The Chaiwala. Every hole knows the sun that frequently comes to shine on it, but you wouldn’t expect the sun to know every hole it shines on, would you?

Even so, my sweet-as-tea suspicion is that the unexceptional Mahadeb may have spurred a few great ideas that keep us inspired: MakeInIndia, for that’s where he makes his tea; StartUpIndia, for each day is a start stoking coal on the stove; SkillIndia, for the sheer artistry of his manner of tossing tea into those cups; YogaDay, for squatting in ardha-padmasana all day on the slaked edge of a simmering stove. He’s also sworn to Swachh Bharat, those immortal last two words LoinCloth uttered before he was felled in the cause of making Bharat a little more Swachh, and which is why his memory has been kindly bestowed omniscience as symbol of scavenging. Don’t you believe the fakenews fib he cried “Hey Ram!”; that’s spurious history requiring, like much else invented during NothingHappened, urgent correction. In any event, “Hey Ram!” is all wrong; it should be “Jai Shri Ram!” That correction has happened. There’s another related sin heretics commit. They say “Jai Siya Ram!” Who’s Siya? That correction too has happened; Siya has been broomed out.

Mahadeb does his bit for SwachhBharat, he puts out bins for neat disposal of his bhaanrs. To little purpose; he sits marooned in used ware carelessly fired in the direction of waste receptacles and almost never deposited to the intended destination. But then that’s to be expected. Men aim poorly, they always have.

Narendra Modi was up to something, and Nitish did not like the thought of it. But it still did not bother him as long as he did not have to deal with his Gujarat counterpart. That changed on 10 May 2009.

The NDA, pushing for L.K. Advani as prime minister, had scheduled one of its biggest shows of strength in the 2009 Lok Sabha campaign at Ludhiana on that date. Invitations had gone out to prominent leaders of all constituent parties and NDA chief ministers. K Chandrashekhar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi had decided to participate, breaking away from the UPA. This had brought new buoyancy to NDA ranks.

Nitish was reluctant to join the rally, averse as he was to sharing a stage with Narendra Modi. He had requested JDU president Sharad Yadav to go. Two days before the rally, Jaitley called Nitish to say Advani was very keen he came, he had made a personal request. Nitish did not commit himself immediately. Jaitley then put Sanjay Jha on the job, and Jha was eventually able to convince Nitish that they’d go by chartered flight, attend the rally and return the same evening. Short and clinical. It would make Advaniji happy.

Nitish and Sanjay Jha flew to Chandigarh, then drove to the rally ground. The Akali hosts had planned the Ludhiana rally Punjabi-style. It was a big and boisterous affair – drums beating, swords flashing, bhangra dancers flexing about. Nitish was probably too taken by the merry commotion to see the prospect he most feared hotfooting it in his direction.

He had barely set foot on the crowded stage when Narendra Modi, having quick-marched from the other end, took his hand and held it aloft for the crowd to see.

A cheer went up that must have buzzed like a fly in Nitish’s ears. Cameras popped and Nitish must have felt like he was being shot. It was over in a trice. Before Nitish could recover his wits, Modi had left him and retreated to his appointed place on the dais.

When he got back into the car with Sanjay Jha after the rally, he lavished him with a hot mouthful. He was fuming. He said, “Isi liye yahan laaye thhe? Aap jaante the kya hone waala hai, provoke kiya gaya hai mujhe aur aapne mujhe phansaaya.” . . . Is this why you brought me here? You knew this was going to happen. I have been provoked and you got me here for this. Sanjay Jha tried a stuttering pacification, but Nitish was in no mood to listen. “Sab deliberate hai, design hai, kal akhbar mein wohi photo chhapega jo us aadmi ne mera haath pakadke jabardasti khhichwaya. Is tarah ki rajneeti ke main sakht khilaf hoon.” . . . All of this is deliberate, part of a design, tomorrow’s papers will carry the very picture which that man held my hand up for. I am strongly opposed to this kind of politicking.

It was Sanjay Jha’s turn to be stunned. He hadn’t realized the depth of Nitish’s aversion to Narendra Modi; his anger dripped ghrina, repugnance.

The two did not exchange a word until they reached Patna. The next morning, when Sanjay Jha saw the photograph plastered across the newspapers, he conceded quietly to himself he may have been the instrument of leading Nitish into a trap; Nitish was flailing in it. Modi’s Ludhiana hand-grab would return to haunt him and the alliance very soon.

In June 2010, a few days before the BJP’s national executive was to meet in Patna, posters began to appear on the city’s walls thanking Narendra Modi for his mahadaan, noble donation, towards relief for Kosi flood victims: a sum of Rs 5 crore.

On the eve of the session, giant hoardings went up on Patna’s vantage crossroads proclaiming Modi’s largesse and expressing gratitude to the Gujarat chief minister on behalf of the people of Bihar. Many of these were sponsored by lesser lights of the local BJP unit, men like Rameshwar Chaurasia and Nitin Navin. Modi was arriving in Bihar for the first time in many years, he had won successive elections in Gujarat, he was being feted by his partymen. Excitement eddied around him.

Nitish was not in Patna when the BJP session began, he was in north Bihar on a leg of his Vikas Yatra, laying the ground for assembly elections that were scheduled within months. He was returning, though; he had assured Sushil Modi he would host a dinner for BJP leaders before they left Patna. Sushil Modi had suggested Chanakya Hotel, where many BJP leaders were staying. Nitish said no, he would call them all home for a meal, hotels are impersonal.

A shamiana had been erected on the lawns of 1 Aney Marg; the kitchen rigged at the back had been given a list of sweetmeats typical to Bihar – balushahi, belgrami, khaja, fine-flour wafers; and, of course, there would be litti and chokha. BD Singh, the energetic Maurya Hotel factotum, had been handed turnkey charge of a five-star menu and service, the chief minister himself would tick the boxes on preparations once he arrived back in Patna.

Invitation cards were printed, individually addressed to each member of the BJP national executive and state leaders. The evening before the dinner, they were handed to Shyam Jaju, an old BJP hand who supervised the party headquarters in Delhi, for distribution.

When the morning’s papers were brought to Nitish the next day, what he saw left him so irate he couldn’t hold his cup of tea straight. Full-page advertisements had appeared in two of Patna’s largest circulated Hindi dailies – Jagaran and Hindustan – thanking Narendra Modi for the Rs 5 crore flood relief money.

The sponsors were a hitherto unknown set that called themselves “Friends of Bihar”. The issuing agency was the Patna-based Expression Ads owned by a PR conduit called Arindam Guha, well-known to both media and government circles. None of those filters could mask the author of the ad. The text on it was irrelevant, it was the subtext that burned into Nitish – the Ludhiana photograph leapt off the page: there it was again, Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, palms clutched and held aloft.

Nitish thought it a distasteful and offensive taunt; worse than a rude joke, a makhaul, mockery.

Narendra Modi had come to Patna, and in one go, twice violated him. He had paid to have a photograph published that Nitish was hustled into and which he wanted deleted from the memory boards. He had made to belittle Bihar by publicizing his relief contribution as a favour done.

About the first thing Nitish did on recovering from his rage was call Sanjay Jha. The dinner won’t happen, recall the invitations. Nitish’s tone told Sanjay Jha it was no time to argue or reason. The chief minister also instructed his home staff to have the shamiana pulled down and the kitchen put out.

Sushil Modi learnt Nitish had scrapped the dinner with the BJP executive still in session. He wasn’t surprised, having seen and remarked upon the newspaper advertisement himself. His worst fears were taking shape, a showdown between the alliance partners just months short of the elections. He had, in fact, advised party leaders not to hold the session in Patna, he didn’t want to be dealing with intra-alliance irritants when the focus was on the approaching polls.

The BJP leadership had settled on Patna for quite the same reason – a session ahead of elections would serve to galvanise party cadres. Sushil Modi tried reasoning with Nitish through intermediaries, but in vain. Galat message chala jaayega chunav ke pehle, he argued, this will send out a wrong message before elections. The deputy chief minister knew he would fetch no quarter. He knew his boss to be a stubborn man, and now that he had taken a position, he wouldn’t give.

Nitish was curt and unmoved. “Galat message chala gaya hai, aap logon ne bheja hai, meri jaankari ke bina yeh sab chhapa kaise?” . . . The wrong message has already gone out and you people have sent it. How did this get published without my knowledge?

That afternoon Nitish had invited journalists who had arrived from Delhi to cover the BJP session to a casual interaction over lunch at the Chanakya Hotel. He came visibly upset and told his guests he had withdrawn the dinner invitation to BJP leaders and was seeking an inquiry into how the advertisement was published. “Serious maamla hai, iski tehkikaat hogi.” … it is a serious issue, it will be probed.

Beyond the political immorality Nitish saw in it, there was also a case, if thin, for legal violations. No paid-for material that carried a photograph of the chief minister was meant to be published without the approval of the government’s information department. Rakesh Dubey, a mid-level police officer, was asked to investigate the paper trail of the ad. His mission took him as far as Surat but the tracks had been efficiently covered. Dubey gathered that among the backers of Friends of Bihar, an outfit never heard of before or since, was the BJP MP from Navsari, CR Patil, and that a sum of Rs 30 lakhs had been paid, through Expression Ads, as fees.

At this point, Nitish was reconciled to breaking with the BJP.

He told confidants to be prepared to strike out on their own in the elections. Gloom had descended on the BJP camp; many top leaders, including the then party chief Nitin Gadkari, L.K. Advani and Arun Jaitley, sensed Narendra Modi had caused unnecessary provocation, jolted the alliance. It wasn’t good news. They had lost to the Congress at the Centre a second successive time in 2009. Narendra Modi’s public sneer could rob them of another key state.

But Narendra Modi could not understand what the fuss over the advertisement was all about. He grumbled about Nitish’s bad manners – how rude and uncultured of him to withdraw a dinner invitation, he ranted to his set of loyalists that night, and why should I not be welcome in an NDA-ruled state? It is time these questions are asked.

When he addressed a party rally at the Gandhi Maidan the next afternoon, he rubbed the Gujarat-Bihar comparison in – “You folks in Bihar are just about emerging from the ditch you have been in. Come to Gujarat and see what a prosperous place we have created there…” He was putting Nitish down. He concluded his speech without naming him.

For the next few days it seemed a parting of ways was imminent. Nitish announced he had sent back the Rs 5 crore cheque to Gujarat; rebuffed, the BJP leadership reacted: it wasn’t a personal cheque for Nitish, Gadkari countered in a meeting with JDU president Sharad Yadav in Delhi, it was meant for the people of Bihar, Nitish is insulting us. Sharad Yadav was grim and silent, he hadn’t the authority to speak on Nitish’s behalf. He only informed the BJP chief calmly that his indignation may be a little misplaced because from what he knew, the Gujarat government had cashed the spurned cheque into its account the day it arrived back.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/10/19/inside-story-why-nitish-kumar-fell-out-with-narendra-modi/feed/0sankarshanthakurTheBrothersBihari81kloGj5K5LEndgame: Why Nitish Kumar broke with Narendra Modi and the other Modi’s role in ithttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/10/16/endgame-the-nitish-modi-war-and-the-other-modis-role-in-it/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/10/16/endgame-the-nitish-modi-war-and-the-other-modis-role-in-it/#respondFri, 16 Oct 2015 05:53:44 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1038Continue reading Endgame: Why Nitish Kumar broke with Narendra Modi and the other Modi’s role in it]]>

The Big Fight

An except from my new omnibus volume “The Brothers Bihari”on Laloo Yadav and Nitish Kumar on why and how Nitish Kumar fought with Narendra Modi and eventually broke away

Dream governance was rudely and repeatedly disrupted by troubled sleep. The NDA partners of Bihar had turned bitter bedfellows, they had rolled to far sides, mistrust had crept and lay in between. There were three in the marriage; it had become unworkable. Because he abhorred taking Narendra Modi’s name, Nitish called him the ‘third party’: ‘We made a great pair all these years, there were no problems between us. It is only when a third party began to interfere from outside that we broke apart.’ He thought Modi’s shadow an illicit violation of the JDU-BJP compact in Bihar.

One day at a rally near Gaya in mid-2012, Narendra Modi posters popped up below Nitish’s stage with a staccato burst of ‘Desh ka neta kaisa ho? Narendra Modi jaisa ho!’ It left Nitish stunned and livid. He had been playing the all-is-well charade for a while, but he knew all was not well. Every day the rift over Modi was becoming sharper, more apparent. Ministers came out of cabinet meetings and jeered their chief minister for opposing Narendra Modi. Spokespersons of the two parties duelled in television debates. In the public eye, Nitish’s government lost the complexion of solutions; it began to look like a problem.

But Nitish had seen this coming. More than anyone else in the JDU, he had a sense of the Sangh Parivar’s pulse. He suspected a split might become inevitable soon. He suspected Modi’s surge to the top of the BJP was irrevocable. It was not for nothing that he kept the BJP out of the Adhikar Yatra—the signature public campaign of his second term—launched more than a year before the split. He could well have made it an NDA platform, but he did not want any credit gone to the BJP. His Adhikar Yatra he used to rally the JDU’s workers across the state, to give them a cause and an identity separate from the BJP and the NDA. He was preparing them for a break.

***

In 2005, Nitish had said no to getting Narendra Modi to come to Bihar to help with the campaign, not even after he fell short in the first of two assembly elections held that year. Defeat did not tempt him to import Gujarat’s rising star to see if he could add to the NDA kitty. Some in the BJP did suggest it, but Nitish rejected the offer out of hand. Nitish believed that the antiMuslim violence under Modi in 2002 and his subsequent defence of it—calling it a ‘natural reaction’ to the burning of a train vestibule full of Hindu pilgrims at Godhra—was one of the reasons Vajpayee lost power in 2004. Nitish was a Cabinet minister in Vajpayee’s NDA government in 2002 but he had not quit over Gujarat. He had merely taken his reservations to Vajpayee, who attempted feeble and oblique corrections. Vajpayee had reminded Modi of the obligations of rajdharma, a concept of kingship that imbricates the great Hindu epics. The BJP, though, endorsed Modi sans an ion of censure, and celebrated his politics of fracture in Gujarat. After the defeat in the national elections of 2004 Nitish argued, albeit only in private, that Modi had rudely shaken down what Vajpayee had assiduously built up—a liberal, secular temper of governance. ‘Poore Hindustan ke Musalmaan aur dharma-nirpeksh tabkon mein bhay aur asuraksha ka message chala gaya Modi ki wajah se, NDA ko haani hui, divisive neta is desh ko acceptable nahin hai.’ . . . A message of fear and insecurity has gone out to Muslim and secular sections across the country because of Modi, the NDA has suffered. Divisive leaders are not acceptable to this country.

The one thing he had resolved ahead of coming to power was never to allow Modi anywhere near Bihar. Nitish had very different ideas of how he wanted to run the state, should he get the opportunity. When he got it, in November 2005, he presented the parameters of the alliance to the BJP. The alliance would run by special arrangement: it would be guided by secular ideas and policies of the kind Lohiaite socialists espoused; minority protection and promotion would be one of its directive principles; the BJP or the Sangh would cease to press the Hindutva agenda; Bihar would remain off-limits for Narendra Modi’s politics.

Of course, none of this was written down; such agreements between political parties seldom are. They are letters of trust notarized in the court of public opinion. Arun Jaitley and Sushil Modi, Nitish’s friend from university, who became the deputy chief minister with charge of the finance portfolio, would be the executors of this compact on the BJP’s behalf; Nitish, already signed on as junior NDA ally, promised to play by the BJP’s national ambition of regaining power at the Centre. Sanjay Jha was the intermediary between Nitish and Jaitley, ferrying messages to and fro, helping iron out what differences came up.

In Nitish’s first term, barely any problems arose. Jaitley and Sushil Modi remained honest to the coalition’s unwritten code, even through periods they may have had cause to quibble. Nitish reopened proceedings against those guilty of the antiMuslim violence of 1989 in Bhagalpur, a consequence of the BJP’s Ayodhya temple campaign. The culprits were located and punished. Properties sold by panic-stricken Muslims were restored to them or cash compensation handed out. The 383 government also opened its purse-strings for minority welfare programmes. As finance minister, Sushil Modi signed the cheques; in the BJP’s annals, he must rank as the man who has handed out the biggest doles to Muslims. He did so uncomplainingly and often at the cost of being chided by partymen.

By the by, that chiding turned to rebuke. During a leadership meeting in Delhi in 2008, some colleagues tore into Sushil Modi for behaving more loyal to Nitish than to the objectives of the party, of having turned the BJP in Bihar into a ‘subservient tool’ of Nitish. The chief minister is pursuing his political programmes and objectives, they complained, the BJP is at a standstill, it is not able to express itself, it is not able to expand, it has been reduced to Nitish’s ‘B’ team. Some of these voices belonged to party leaders from Bihar, men like Bhagalpur MP Shahnawaz Hussain and Rajiv Pratap Rudy. Sushil Modi turned to them and wondered if the party wanted to be part of the Bihar alliance at all? He underlined the framework under which the government ran and told his colleagues he would like to hear their views on whether they thought those terms worth their while. His critics went quiet, but that did not mean they were pleased. They wanted to control Nitish rather than be controlled by him, to dominate Bihar’s decision-making, its political discourse. Nitish was not even bothering to consult them, leave alone yield them space on government and governance matters. He was happy to deal with Sushil Modi and, in Delhi, with Jaitley. ‘What use is being part of a ruling coalition in Bihar,’ one BJP MP carped privately to me during that period. ‘What use is it when I cannot even recommend someone for a petty job, cannot assure a small contract, cannot manage to have a troublesome officer transferred? Nitish has hijacked this alliance and our own leaders have allowed him to.’ This lobby had its counterparts in Patna, equally irate, reduced to colourful cribbing: hum log is sarkar ke napunsak dulha hain, we are the impotent grooms of this government. Men like Rameshwar Chaurasia and Nitin Naveen, both MLAs, men like Giriraj Singh, minister in Nitish’s government. Some of them had begun to spend time in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad as guests of the Gujarat government. Nitish had a good sense what was taking them on journeys across the subcontinent, and what messages they might be coming back with. Narendra Modi was upto something, and Nitish did not like the thought of it. But it still did not bother him as long as he did not have to deal with his Gujarat counterpart. That changed on 10 May 2009.

The NDA, pushing for L.K. Advani as prime minister, had scheduled one of its biggest shows of strength in the 2009 Lok Sabha campaign at Ludhiana on that date. Invitations had gone out to prominent leaders of all constituent parties and NDA chief ministers. K. Chandrashekhar Rao of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi had decided to participate, breaking away from the UPA. This had brought new buoyancy to NDA ranks.

Nitish was reluctant to join the rally, averse as he was to sharing a stage with Narendra Modi. He had requested JDU president Sharad Yadav to go. Two days before the rally, Jaitley called Nitish to say Advani was very keen he came, he had made a personal request. Nitish did not commit himself immediately. Jaitley then put Sanjay Jha on the job, and Jha was eventually able to convince Nitish that they’d go by chartered flight, attend the rally and return the same evening. Short and clinical. It would make Advaniji happy.

Nitish and Sanjay Jha flew to Chandigarh, then drove to the rally ground. The Akali hosts had planned the Ludhiana rally Punjabi-style. It was a big and boisterous affair—drums beating, swords flashing, bhangra dancers flexing about. Nitish was 385 probably too taken by the merry commotion to see the prospect he most feared hotfooting it in his direction. He had barely set foot on the crowded stage when Narendra Modi, having quickmarched from the other end, took his hand and held it aloft for the crowd to see. A cheer went up that must have buzzed like a fly in Nitish’s ears. Cameras popped and Nitish must have felt like he was being shot. It was over in a trice. Before Nitish could recover his wits, Modi had left him and retreated to his appointed place on the dais. When he got back into the car with Sanjay Jha after the rally, he lavished him with a hot mouthful. He was fuming. He said, ‘Isi liye yahan laaye thhe? Aap jaante the kya hone waala hai, provoke kiya gaya hai mujhe aur aapne mujhe phansaaya.’ . . . Is this why you brought me here? You knew this was going to happen. I have been provoked and you got me here for this. Sanjay Jha tried a stuttering pacification, but Nitish was in no mood to listen. ‘Sab deliberate hai, design hai, kal akhbar mein wohi photo chhapega jo us aadmi ne mera haath pakadke jabardasti khhichwaya. Is tarah ki rajneeti ke main sakht khilaf hoon.’ . . . All of this is deliberate, part of a design, tomorrow’s papers will carry the very picture which that man held my hand up for. I am strongly opposed to this kind of politicking. It was Sanjay Jha’s turn to be stunned. He hadn’t realized the depth of Nitish’s aversion to Narendra Modi; his anger dripped ghrina, repugnance. The two did not exchange a word until they reached Patna.

The next morning, when Sanjay Jha saw the photograph plastered across the newspapers, he conceded quietly to himself he may have been the instrument of leading Nitish into a trap; Nitish was flailing in it. Modi’s Ludhiana hand-grab would return to haunt him and the alliance very soon.

In June 2010, a few days before the BJP’s national executive was to meet in Patna, posters began to appear on the city’s the big fight 386 the brothers bihari walls thanking Narendra Modi for his mahadaan, noble donation, towards relief for Kosi flood victims: a sum of Rs 5 crore. On the eve of the session, giant hoardings went up on Patna’s vantage crossroads proclaiming Modi’s largesse and expressing gratitude to the Gujarat chief minister on behalf of the people of Bihar. Many of these were sponsored by lesser lights of the local BJP unit, men like Rameshwar Chaurasia and Nitin Navin. Modi was arriving in Bihar for the first time in many years, he had won successive elections in Gujarat, he was being feted by his partymen. Excitement eddied around him.

Nitish was not in Patna when the BJP session began, he was in north Bihar on a leg of his Vikas Yatra, laying the ground for assembly elections that were scheduled within months. He was returning, though; he had assured Sushil Modi he would host a dinner for BJP leaders before they left Patna. Sushil Modi had suggested Chanakya Hotel, where many BJP leaders were staying. Nitish said no, he would call them all home for a meal, hotels are impersonal. A shamiana had been erected on the lawns of 1 Aney Marg; the kitchen rigged at the back had been given a list of sweetmeats typical to Bihar—balushahi, belgrami, khaja, fine-flour wafers; and, of course, there would be litti and chokha. B.D. Singh, the energetic Maurya Hotel factotum, had been handed turnkey charge of a five-star menu and service, the chief minister himself would tick the boxes on preparations once he arrived back in Patna. Invitation cards were printed, individually addressed to each member of the BJP national executive and state leaders. The evening before the dinner, they were handed to Shyam Jaju, an old BJP hand who supervised the party headquarters in Delhi, for distribution.

When the morning’s papers were brought to Nitish the next day, what he saw left him so irate he couldn’t hold his cup of tea straight. Full-page advertisements had appeared in two of Patna’s largest circulated Hindi dailies—Jagaran and Hindustan—thanking Narendra Modi for the Rs 5 crore flood relief money. The sponsors were a hitherto unknown set that called themselves ‘Friends of Bihar’. The issuing agency was the Patna-based Expression Ads owned by a PR conduit called Arindam Guha, well-known to both media and government circles. None of those filters could mask the author of the ad. The text on it was irrelevant, it was the subtext that burned into Nitish—the Ludhiana photograph leapt off the page: there it was again, Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, palms clutched and held aloft. Nitish thought it a distasteful and offensive taunt; worse than a rude joke, a makhaul, mockery. Narendra Modi had come to Patna, and in one go, twice violated him. He had paid to have a photograph published that Nitish was hustled into and which he wanted deleted from the memory boards. He had made to belittle Bihar by publicizing his relief contribution as a favour done. About the first thing Nitish did on recovering from his rage was call Sanjay Jha. The dinner won’t happen, recall the invitations. Nitish’s tone told Sanjay Jha it was no time to argue or reason. The chief minister also instructed his home staff to have the shamiana pulled down and the kitchen put out.

Sushil Modi learnt Nitish had scrapped the dinner with the BJP executive still in session. He wasn’t surprised, having seen and remarked upon the newspaper advertisement himself. His worst fears were taking shape, a showdown between the alliance partners just months short of the elections. He had, in fact, advised party leaders not to hold the session in Patna, he didn’t want to be dealing with intra-alliance irritants when the focus was on the approaching polls. The BJP leadership had settled on Patna for quite the same reason—a session ahead of elections would serve to galvanize party cadres. Sushil Modi tried the big fight 388 the brothers bihari reasoning with Nitish through intermediaries, but in vain. Galat message chala jaayega chunav ke pehle, he argued, this will send out a wrong message before elections. The deputy chief minister knew he would fetch no quarter. He knew his boss to be a stubborn man, and now that he had taken a position, he wouldn’t give. Nitish was curt and unmoved. ‘Galat message chala gaya hai, aap logon ne bheja hai, meri jaankari ke bina yeh sab chhapa kaise?’ . . . The wrong message has already gone out and you people have sent it. How did this get published without my knowledge? That afternoon Nitish had invited journalists who had arrived from Delhi to cover the BJP session to a casual interaction over lunch at the Chanakya Hotel. He came visibly upset and told his guests he had withdrawn the dinner invitation to BJP leaders and was seeking an inquiry into how the advertisement was published. ‘Serious maamla hai, iski tehkikaat hogi.’ . . . it is a serious issue, it will be probed. Beyond the political immorality Nitish saw in it, there was also a case, if thin, for legal violations. No paid-for material that carried a photograph of the chief minister was meant to be published without the approval of the government’s information department. Rakesh Dubey, a mid-level police officer, was asked to investigate the paper trail of the ad. His mission took him as far as Surat but the tracks had been efficiently covered. Dubey gathered that among the backers of Friends of Bihar, an outfit never heard of before or since, was the BJP MP from Navsari, C. R. Patil, and that a sum of Rs 30 lakhs had been paid, through Expression Ads, as fees. At this point, Nitish was reconciled to breaking with the BJP. He told confidants to be prepared to strike out on their own in the elections. Gloom had descended on the BJP camp; many top leaders, including the then party chief Nitin Gadkari, L.K. Advani and Arun Jaitley, sensed Narendra Modi had 389 caused unnecessary provocation, jolted the alliance. It wasn’t good news. They had lost to the Congress at the Centre a second successive time in 2009. Narendra Modi’s public sneer could rob them of another key state.

But Narendra Modi could not understand what the fuss over the advertisement was all about. He grumbled about Nitish’s bad manners—how rude and uncultured of him to withdraw a dinner invitation, he ranted to his set of loyalists that night, and why should I not be welcome in an NDA-ruled state? It is time these questions are asked. When he addressed a party rally at the Gandhi Maidan the next afternoon, he rubbed the Gujarat-Bihar comparison in—‘You folks in Bihar are just about emerging from the ditch you have been in. Come to Gujarat and see what a prosperous place we have created there . . .’ He was putting Nitish down. He concluded his speech without naming him. For the next few days it seemed a parting of ways was imminent. Nitish announced he had sent back the Rs 5 crore cheque to Gujarat; rebuffed, the BJP leadership reacted: it wasn’t a personal cheque for Nitish, Gadkari countered in a meeting with JDU president Sharad Yadav in Delhi, it was meant for the people of Bihar, Nitish is insulting us. Sharad Yadav was grim and silent, he hadn’t the authority to speak on Nitish’s behalf. He only informed the BJP chief calmly that his indignation may be a little misplaced because from what he knew, the Gujarat government had cashed the spurned cheque into its account the day it arrived back. Nitish had pre-publicized Vikas Yatra outings in the vicinity of Patna and two of his cabinet colleagues were meant to accompany him—Sushil Modi and Nand Kishore Yadav, both of the BJP. They were advised by their party not to go until the row had been resolved. Sushil Modi took ill, Nand Kishore Yadav discovered urgent personal engagements. Neither went. the big fight 390 the brothers bihari The crisis was getting out of hand. The government was on hold. Neither side was willing to explore a way out. The one man who could have played peacemaker was far away; immediately after the Patna session, Arun Jaitley had set off with his family on a cruise vacation across faraway seas.

Sanjay Jha found himself helpless and confounded in the tangle. He was relatively new to such scrapping between leaders, he was rattled. After much trying, he got through to Jaitley on the phone and told him things had turned much worse after Nitish’s decision to spurn Narendra Modi’s cheque. To hear out the minutiae of the squabble on holiday left Jaitley a little exasperated—how could a successful alliance break because two fellows had flung their egos in the way, people will laugh at the NDA, we will lose Bihar, do something, I am sure something can be done, just hold on a few days. Before hanging up, Jaitley left Sanjay Jha with one underlined instruction: do what you may but don’t leave Nitish’s side until I return, hear him out, keep him engaged, don’t leave Patna.

Jaitley must have burned the phone lines thereafter. When Bihar BJP leaders met at Gadkari’s Ferozeshah Road residence in Delhi a couple of days later, the mood was calmer. Some of them—Shahnawaz, Rudy, Giriraj Singh—were still keen on pulling out: we’ll see what happens, Nitish cannot be allowed to hold the alliance to ransom in this fashion, he cannot dictate to us who goes to Bihar and who does not. Sushil Modi fought them off strongly. The alliance was critical to the BJP, he argued, and Nitish was its anointed leader, we must be able to accommodate his reservations. He carried the day. On his return to Patna, Sushil Modi organized a meeting at the residence of C.P. Thakur, then the Bihar BJP president. Anant Kumar and Dharmendra Pradhan came from Delhi, several top leaders of the Bihar BJP were called in. Nitish was the only one representing the JDU, but he was a handful. ‘Deewar ki 391 likhawat padh leejiye, aap log zameen ki rajneeti karte hain to samajh leejiye ki Bihar ka itihaas badalne jaa raha hai aur aap log usko barbad karne par tule hain. Agar yeh alliance raha to 180-200 seat aayegi chunav mein, aur aap is gathbandhan ko todke woh mauka ganwa bhi sakte hain.’ . . . Read the writing on the wall. If you are politicians with your ears to the ground you should understand that the history of Bihar is about to be rewritten, but you are bent on destroying this. If this alliance survives, we are going to get 180-200 seats in the coming election, but you can also choose to rob this alliance of that opportunity.

The BJP said little. The alliance and the government had survived. Narendra Modi stood expressly barred from any political role in Bihar that day on. On the ride back from the meeting, Nitish turned to a colleague, who had waited out the meeting and said sheepishly: ‘I hope I did not overstate my case saying we are about to get 180-200 seats. It is not in my nature to make such claims, but I was very angry, and I wanted them to know what they were putting at stake.’ Nitish was to obliquely reveal the bar on Narendra Modi a few days later. He told a journalist who had wondered, provocatively, if he would invite Narendra Modi for the ensuing election campaign: ‘Bihar mein ek hi Modi kafi hai.’ . . . One Modi is enough for Bihar. He meant his deputy Sushil. The alliance won 206 seats in the elections that followed. It was a landslide. The JDU bagged 115, a whisker from a majority of its own. Nitish settled into office more securely. But when Narendra Modi won his third term in Gujarat two winters later, he turned quickly aggressive and reached out long distance to score a hole in Nitish’s cushion.

***

A month before he pulled the plug on his seventeen-yearalliance in June 2013 and robbed the BJP of its biggest political partner, I went to meet Nitish at 1 Aney Marg. We sat for close the big fight 392 the brothers bihari to two hours under his favoured gazebo on the lawns. It was a hot afternoon but the gazebo is Kumar’s preferred adda, or haunt, on the premises. Revolving fans mounted on wooden posts whirred overhead. Home-made savouries lay served in china bowls on a centre-table—puffed rice tossed in mustard oil, onions and green chillies, roasted gram, boiled peas. Two of his most trusted political aides—R.C.P. Singh and Sanjay Jha—and a senior official sat with Nitish and when I arrived and took the chair beside him, we made a semi-circle.

Nitish was relaxed and expansive, but quick and careful to lay down the rules. ‘Let’s keep this informal, nothing for immediate publication. Tea?’ Without waiting for an answer he signalled a liveried attendant to fetch a fresh round.

Before long the conversation turned to Narendra Modi. Would he keep the alliance if Modi was named to lead? It was as if the very mention of Modi caused his brow to crumple. His grey stubble to prickle. His hairline lips to collapse tighter into each other. His eyes to begin boring through his rimless oblong glasses. He held the arms of his chair, mulled intently, then let out a simple declarative sentence: ‘Us vyakti par koi compromise nahin hoga. Jo vyakti desh ke logon mein bhay paida karta ho uski mahatvakaanksha ke liye apne usoolon ko sati nahi kar sakta. Aap kisi bhram mein mat rahiye.’ . . . There shall be no compromise on that man. I am not prepared to sacrifice my principles at the altar of the ambitions of a man who creates fear in the minds of my countrymen. Have no doubts on that count.

The NDA’s 2009 defeat had left Nitish totally convinced Narendra Modi’s brand of politics was a game of diminishing returns; people, by and large, reacted poorly to sectarian confrontation. He had added Varun Gandhi to the list of those who had hurt the NDA with their truculent posturing towards minorities. In Uttar Pradesh, Nitish had concluded, it was Varun’s virulent Pilibhit campaign that had pushed Muslims 393 towards the Congress which, against all expectations, won twenty-two Lok Sabha seats from the state. Nitish was not ready to allow the communal spew to spill over into Bihar. He had set condition after condition, set deadline after deadline, and without ever naming him, sharpened his critique of Modi’s sectarian image. Consistently he had played a Hofbrauhaus game around his Gujarati bête noire. Nearly everybody that goes looking for Hofbrauhaus in the lanes off Munich’s Marienplatz town square is driven there by its notorious history. Hofbrauhaus is the beerhall where Adolf Hitler formed the Nazi party in 1920. The grand Bavarian arcades and oak gardens of Hofbrauhaus served as a celebration of Nazi ways and values through the lightning decade-and-a-quarter spanning the 1930s and 1940s that changed the shape of the world. It remains a vibrant and popular dive for dining and drinking. Live symphonies boom about the high-arched halls in waves of exhilaration, beermaids shuffle about the bench tables decanting foamed oceans of the house drink. Yet nobody on the premises so much as whispers ‘Adolf’ today, not to talk of Hitler, the cardinal disrepute of this house of repute. It’s a funny self-proscription, a quaint pretence hatched between consciousness and cognizance. Hofbrauhaus, for all its imposed amnesia, is a relic to Hitler but nobody there mentions his name. Narendra Modi, for all the third-person pronouns and adjectives employed, was the man Nitish was always crossing out, but he never brought that name to his lips. Privately, he had lobbied feverishly with the BJP leaders to prevent Modi from taking the centrestage. Till about a year before, he had been assured by Gadkari that the BJP would do nothing without consulting him, assured, in fact, that any future leader of the NDA would be chosen through a consensus in the alliance. But soon thereafter Gadkari was relieved of the BJP presidency and his assurance lay vacated.

Barely a month before, in April 2013, Nitish had raised the pitch against Modi at a session of his party’s national executive in Delhi: ‘Yeh desh ek model se nahin chalne wala, is desh mein bahut saare logon ko, bahut models ko, saath leke chalna padega.’ . . . No single model is going to run in this country, in this country you will have to take many people, many models along. He defined a deadline to the BJP: name your man for PM by December 2013.

I took Nitish back to the winter of 2011 in Saharsa. Hadn’t his worries over Narendra Modi begun to resurface as early as then? He had spelt it out in an interview to me for The Telegraph: ‘The leader of the NDA should be a man of secular image and no rough edges, he should be acceptable not only to NDA partners but should enjoy acceptability across the board; we live in a pluralistic country and we cherish those values.’ It was the first time he had spoken of what was ideal, what he wanted, what ought to be, rather than what oughtn’t. I had asked if that meant he was ruling out Narendra Modi and he said he did not wish to name names: mai ne kabhi kisi ka naam nahin liya, don’t go on individuals, go on what they mean and represent. We moved to the dinner table at the Circuit House, and I asked again, this time informally, if he had meant Modi. He said again that he would not name names, adding, buddhiman ko ishara kaafi hai, to the intelligent, the merest hint should suffice. I got the impression he distinctly did not have present company in mind when he said that; he was sending a signal out to the BJP brass. A few months later, in June 2012, he added a critical rider to his Saharsa conditions in an interview to P.R. Ramesh and Ashok K. Mishra of The Economic Times: the BJP should consult NDA partners well ahead of the 2014 general election and announce its prime ministerial candidate. His message was clear: he was not prepared to be strung along by the BJP and have Narendra Modi imposed on NDA partners as fait accompli at too late a juncture. A new migraine had begun to trouble his sleep. He had warded off Narendra Modi from Bihar, but what if he became his boss in Delhi? As future prime minister, or even as the NDA’s prime ministerial nominee? He wouldn’t be led into that situation. As a close ally for more than a decade-and-a-half, Nitish had a good sense of how the BJP and the Sangh worked. During his years as minister in the Vajpayee government, he had acquired wide penetration in the Sangh Parivar warren—sleeper contacts, acquaintances, friends, men like L.K. Advani, Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari. Lately, he had also pulled Sanjay Jha, Jaitley confidant and key alliance intermediary, to his side. Sushil Modi and Sarju Rai he knew since there were all university students. Rai had shifted base to Ranchi and now worked for the BJP in Jharkhand, but he was intermittently in touch. There is no cause to believe Rai was ever disloyal to the causes of the BJP, but he was a finely nuanced man, a man to value old friends and friendships. He celebrated the JDU-BJP alliance and offered advice to both sides when asked. He had worked hard, and often singlehanded, to build the fodder case against Laloo Yadav, and wished the government that had replaced the Laloo regime well. He was pained to see it come apart. But being a man of few words, he seldom spoke openly about it. So Nitish’s inputs on developments within the BJP were rich. He had a far better sense of the subterranean stirrings in the Parivar than many BJP leaders themselves. Information was always coming his way, formal, informal, hushed only-between-you-and-me nuggets that helped him piece together the shape of things to come. To him, there was no confusion about the shape emerging: it was the shape of the man whose name he abhorred bringing to his lips.

A day before, deputy Prime Minister Bamdev Gautam nearly pulled out of the completion rites of a major rescue mission near the Shobha Bhagwati Bridge on the capital’s outskirts for fear of being heckled; he had to be assured by senior Indian officials in charge of the operation no harm would come to him before Gautam agreed to go.

On the boundary rails of the Singha Durbar, seat of Nepal’s government, Kathmandu residents have put up a missing-person notice as taunt to their representative in the Constituent Assembly: “Dhyan Govind, where are you? And where is the aid?”

The quake-hit remains of the Gorkha Boys School at Rani Pokhari in central Kathmandu.

The quake has opened a chasm between Nepal’s political class and the people that’s brimming over with ire and indignation.

“Our leadership has collectively retreated from responsibility in a time of grave crisis,” says Kumar Regmi, one of Nepal’s better-known constitutional lawyers.

“Much less come forward and come to grips with the situation, they have not even moved to empathise with the people they rule, or even been on call in their hour of need. It makes things worse that the government and Opposition are united in their dereliction; the people have no option to forsake one formation and embrace another.”

In the days since Nepal’s worst quake in living memory struck, the national leadership has made its truancy palpably felt. It has not presented itself on the crisis barricades, it has absented itself from the public discourse.

The government has omitted to engage with a stricken nation, issuing neither appeal nor assurance from the helm it occupies. It has shut its door to media interaction or questioning. It has left coordination and execution of rescue and relief efforts to the army. It has offered little sense to the people it is an institution whose central purpose is to serve them.

“Where are the people we worked and voted for?” asks Akhilesh Shreshtha, a farmer from Sindhupalchok district, who has lost his home and three near ones.

“Where is the government that said it wants Nepal to be a democracy, a republic of the people? Where are those people? Surveying our tragedy from helicopters?”

That sentiment is widespread, bubbling across Nepal as victims await succour.

It’s the kind of anger that former Kathmandu mayor and Nepali environment minister P.L. Singh finds just as well as alarming.

“I am least surprised the politicians are running scared, they have lost credibility overtime and with this quake they stand exposed; they have proved themselves a set that can only serve themselves, not the people. That can’t be good for the health of a democracy; this democracy is failing the people,” Singh says.

A long-serving leader of the Nepali Congress and a man with access to inside workings of the government, Singh said: “The government and administration are in total disarray, such that they are sitting on piles of aid and relief and cannot get it distributed; they don’t know what to tell international rescue and relief workers; even senior minister don’t know, they are just busy trying to hide from the people.”

A senior Nepali government official who attended a government-international aid agency interface revealed on condition of anonymity that department heads had not been able to furnish clear directions to aid workers; their most offered response: “We shall let you know.”

Caroline Anning, a “Save the Children” volunteer from the UK, told The Telegraph she and her team had been working “pretty much on our own”.

Her great advantage was she had had a previous stint in Nepal. “It’s because I know people here and have some sense of what might be needed where that we are able to make some headway. There isn’t a central place or nodal agency that is overseeing deployment.”

For a volunteer fresh in Nepal – and there are many – the lack of local guidance can be a handicap – to them and, more critically, to the aid effort.

On the road to Gorkha in the west Nepal hills, we ran into a stranded medical team from Bihar. The doctors were taking a nap in a local lodge, the ambulance and a bus loaded with medicines and first aid were being washed.

“For three days we have only been running from one place to another,” said driver Ram Kumar.

“Wherever somebody sends us we are told we are not required; now we are headed to Gorkha, if there is nothing to be done there we may just head back.”

Back at the Tudikhel camp in Kathmandu, where Prime Minister Koirala was jeered, Bikram Bhele, a displaced tour operator, made a cutting summation of why public rage was beginning to sporadically erupt: “This lot (the politicians) have not been able to give this country a Constitution for seven years now; do you think they can be up to any good other than holding on to power?”

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/05/03/anger-of-quake-hit-nepalis-comes-home-to-nepali-leadership/feed/0sankarshanthakurThe quake-hit remains of the Gorkha Boys School at Rani Pokhari in central Kathmandu. No hands to dig, no time to crematehttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/05/01/no-hands-to-dig-no-time-to-cremate/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/05/01/no-hands-to-dig-no-time-to-cremate/#respondFri, 01 May 2015 05:40:26 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1031Continue reading No hands to dig, no time to cremate]]>Sindhupalchok (Northern Nepal), April 29: This is where nature often marinates havoc before serving up tragedy for Bihar – the confluence of the Indravati and the Sunn Kosi which collaborate to make a frequent killing field of the Kosi’s benighted floodplains downstream.
It isn’t their turn to wreak turbulence this season though, at least not yet. Death has sprung from underneath them and cannoned into the skies, ripping whatever fell its way – habitations, cattle pens, orchards, vegetations, mountain bends and causeways, often plain rock.

To see the state of boulders pounded, you’d think ‘rock solid’ isn’t a metaphor to use for impregnable strength anymore.

Where the quake passed, it plundered the mountain to powder and sent it down in showers. What survived the tremor underneath was buried from above.

Villagers of a remote mountain village in Sindhupalchok in Nepal’s north try to salvage what they can from their collapsed homes

Destruction has leapfrogged the hills of Sindhupalchok, scoring stab wounds in remote crannies that will take days, even weeks, to discover, much less heal.

“We’ve been left to ourselves all this time,” Bishnu Tamang, a Nepal police constable, told us in Sangha Chowk, a remote hill hamlet. “Everything has collapsed, how much can we dig with human hands, people and cattle are still buried under. We haven’t heard of help, we haven’t been able to call for help.”

Tamang, a strapping lad, his blue fatigues stained with the rigours of desperate rescue, complained, but he also spoke with faith and fortitude: “The truth is there’s destruction everywhere, our turn to be found and helped will come.”

They were a team of eight jawans, he said, too few hands to make a difference to the mayhem that had taken hundreds of families in its grip.

About 120km north-east of Kathmandu, Sindhupalchok is among Nepal’s northern-most districts. It is also, in many parts, hard to access.

At Tatopaani, higher up, Sindhupalchok abuts China on a “Friendship Bridge” manned by the red-hatted People’s Liberation Army (PLA); it’s where the road to Lhasa leads from. But the road to Tatopaani currently lies breached by avalanches and rock falls.

There are too many parts of Sindhupalchok defying access; when they are finally reached by search and rescue teams, it may well turn out this patch was especially favoured for devastation. The toll from these parts has mounted swiftly over the past three days; it’s estimated by district authorities to cross 2,000.

“Hundreds of villages are affected, we do not even know precisely which,” said Ganesh Shreshtha, a junior, but only official at the sub-district offices in Chautara. “It is impossible to have an estimate of those dead or affected but bad news is coming all the time, and we do not have many resources, not even enough men.”

Families escaped from affected villages were camped in Chautara’s open spaces, left to their own devices. Some had pulled vinyl sheets overhead, one group had found a length of corrugated roofing. They had lit wood fires, the women cooked what there was, sitting haunched. The children rolled in the red dust.

From the gorge of Dolalghat, where the Indravati and the Sunn Kosi meet, we had climbed a steep road to come upon the windy spur of Sangha Chowk; it had been blown off its perch like a straw thing in the wind. On both sides of the road, the rubble of what were homes rolled down the slopes.

Under a surviving tree lay the body of a dead man, covered over in a sheet of plastic held down by bricks. Nobody had claimed the body, nobody seemed to know who the man was. Probably just a passer-by taken by shock. They would have to cremate him sooner, but nobody in Sangha Chowk seemed to have the time.

Just across from the dead man under the tree stood Ganesh Giri amid the ramshackle mess of what he had been able to salvage from his fallen home – a dresser, its mirror miraculously intact, a wrought iron television rack with the television gone, a few bowls and ladles, dust-laden cushions, torn bed sheets, his granddaughter’s stuffed monkey toy.

Alas, the quake buried the girl, just six; by the time they got to pull her out, the rubble had asphyxiated her. “There are too many people down the hill and everywhere and there is no way to rescue them,” Giri wailed.

“And there are lots of cattle heads and goats and material. People are so afraid for their lives, they would not even go into rescue because they fear another tremor will strike and they will be gone. Why can the government not come to help? Why do the helicopters just fly by and never land? Why have we been forgotten?”

Forget what doses of strife the Indravati and the Sunn Kosi might offer Bihar post-monsoon, at the moment the recipes are being readied for Nepal – a hot pot of public anger with liberal sprinklings of dereliction.

Bhaktapur, April 28: When Shiva’s chariot runs amok, it’s naive not to expect devastation in its wake. Bhaktapur is witness.

Once every year, and no more, residents of this cameo township 30 kilometres north of Kathmandu festoon their “Bhairav rath” and cart it around in celebration of the Nepali New Year, which falls in April’s first half.

It’s a mastodon chariot, fitted with four chunky wooden wheels; atop sit three tiers of a pewter pagoda. It only stirs when half of Bhaktapur strains to pull, and the other half pushes.

Last Saturday, the quake loosened its many tethers and rolled it down the alley it was parked in, a behemoth in free trundle. By the time it came to rest in Durbar Square, Bhaktapur’s brick-lined central piazza, the town lay plundered.

The “Bhairav rath” had travelled no more than a few metres, and no longer than a few seconds, but that is all it often takes strong quakes to wreak their havoc. And this was no earthly quake; this was the dance of Bhairav, revered manifestation of Shiva’s wrath.

“Before we could sense what was happening, it was all over,” said Raviraj Luintel, a Bhaktapur cafe owner.

“We were taken by a cloud of dust and when it lifted, it revealed half our town razed. It came and went quick, like a cannon bolt. It left us stunned.”

To Luintel it means little today that Bhaktapur is globally feted as a marvel of architecture and certified by the Unesco charter as a World Heritage City. “But where’s the city? It’s gone, what we have is remains of it.”

Guardian deities at a collapsed shrine.

King Ananda Malla, medieval potentate of the Kathmandu valley, was a pioneer and patron of fine design; he invested resource and rigour in laying out the capital of his Newari kingdom at Bhaktapur in the 12th century.

It was to be a polished red-brick city crafted around expansive squares, crisscrossed by paved lanes and dotted with ornate temples and gazebos. Successive Malla rulers embellished Bhaktapur’s masonry with intricate wood, metal and stone work, such that each structure was a unique piece of art.

Most of what took centuries to painstakingly arrange, it took only a trice to wantonly dismantle. At the mouth of the township, a sandstone dragon gaped pitifully from a pile of brickwork, a once proud figurine knocked rudely to the ground from its august perch.

Round the corner, in one of the tinier squares, stood granite lions and elephants and mythic bulls flanking a pyramidal stairway leading up – guardian avatars to a shrine that had now turned to irretrievable rubble.

To its side stood a temple, a chaste white steeple draped around a crimson Durga. Bamboo poles formed a makeshift circumference around it to prevent people from coming to peril. The quake had riven cracks right up the inner dome; the temple would collapse to the slightest hint of a tremor.

The artefacts museum close by had been marked off limits; an army guard said its walls had been rendered so fragile they could fall any time.

The squares, usually overrun by tourist footfall, were all taken by residents. They had spread out mattresses and stoked kitchen fires, and pulled out what worldly goods they could from their fallen homes – jewellery boxes, utensils, mirrors, linen, poly bags stuffed with clothing, fish and vegetables crated in styrofoam. Some still had dregs of ice.

“Even those whose homes are standing are afraid to go indoors,” said Malati Bishta, a goods store owner. “Somebody or another is forever warning of another quake, nobody wants to die, and so we are all living in the open, sleeping, eating, bathing, just looking at what has suddenly become of our lives.”

Bhaktapur is shaken, and petrified of being stirred again.

The Durbar Square is a restorer’s dream, and everybody else’s nightmare – escarpments of trampled roofs and shattered brickwork everywhere you look. It’s like a dinosaur has been on the romp, and forgotten to take its toy along – that humongous chariot, stranded in the middle of the vista, its wheels jammed into the ground, its ropes disarranged like a witch’s hemp hair.

Bhaktapuris fear to approach it yet, preferring a dazed bewilderment from a safe remove. Their eyes are still glazed, they move about as if in stupor, tourists in their own town surveying the ruins of the new, demolished Bhaktapur.

Unesco’s surviving heritage plaques on sundry walls must mock their reality. None of its proclaimed protections to the heritage city stood a chance when Bhairav resolved to dance.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/29/bhairavs-rath-and-wrath-a-marvel-of-architecture-lies-in-ruins-in-nepal/feed/0sankarshanthakurDeluged by the dead – Pyres set water on firehttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/29/deluged-by-the-dead-pyres-set-water-on-fire/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/29/deluged-by-the-dead-pyres-set-water-on-fire/#respondWed, 29 Apr 2015 12:05:28 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1024Continue reading Deluged by the dead – Pyres set water on fire]]>Pashupati, Kathmandu, April 27: The Bagmati flows scant and shallow through Kathmandu. Today, it flowed slow and sorrowful, laden with far too heavy a mortal consignment to push along.

The banks had run out of ground to stack pyre on. The bodies would not stop arriving, each attached to its tableau of the inconsolable.

There was nowhere to go. They had to be waded in on a wobbly bamboo raft and set alight midstream.

The Bagmati had become a river deluged by the dead, its waters on fire, its pebbled bed choked with the remains of what is no more.

Victims of the earthquake being cremated in Kathmandu on Monday.

Smoke rose in blue plumes and hung still on the trees, evading the drifts. The forbidding pagoda of Pashupatinath brooded over the proceedings, the eternal eye presiding over ephemeral rites.

Rush hour at the open crematorium by the Bagmati had run more than 24 hours. There was no sign it would come to ebb anytime soon.

“We have been burning them all day and all night,” said Tarak Nath, a crematorium handler, catching his breath between one smoked life and another. “You can tell this will go on for a while. Everybody wants their dead brought to Pashupati.”

An old man sitting haunched nearby muttered to no one in particular that he had heard more than 3,000 people were reported to have been consumed by Saturday’s quake. (The official count stood at over 4,000 on Monday evening.)

A woman’s anguished shrieks rang over the hubbub and she swooned over the corpse she had just led in. Even in the great temple of the Lord, solace was hard to come.

Mourners stood huddled around their dear departed across the black-stoned Pashupati concourse, awaiting their turn by the Bagmati. Straw mattresses lay piled in the temple’s nooks, awaiting more dead.

The good news thus far was that no after-tremors had followed till this evening; the bad news was that the first two days of shock had already claimed far too many.

Just how many nobody can spell out yet, for large parts of the valley and the hills and the frozen Himalaya remained cut off and inaccessible.

It will take time and patience and grinding work to tell the final toll. But it will climb in the days to come – most reckon, steeply.

“Our experience in such disasters is that initially it is impossible to get close to a realistic figure of casualties,” said Aftab Alam of Plan International, a UK-based disaster management concern. “There is usually no way to tell until search and rescue are completed. We are just starting in Nepal.”

Kathmandu wore a stricken look, beset by its unforeseen tragedy and flustered by foreboding over what may yet come.

Rife rumour has constructed a surreal certainty of aftershocks about to come the next minute. A bird takes flight or a dog barks and people begin to fret and run.

“Is it true that gathering clouds are a sign of another quake?” Rita Bhairab, a college student currently homeless, asked. “Someone said clouds will bring it on and I am scared to look at the sky.”

Rita seemed to herself suspect how unfounded her alarm was. But anxiety had overtaken her good sense.

Around her, at the Tudikhel camp, where the Dharahara minaret stood till the other day, such worry rippled among the thousands displaced. Every kerbside, every roundabout, every little open space has turned into a bivouac of those the quake has tossed out of home.

Tents have been erected in some spaces by the army and by aid agencies but only the fortunate ones are getting to sleep under some manner of cover. Many parts of the town are without water and power.

The queues at fuel stations are long and multiple. The shops are mostly shut. There’s lots to buy in a city that has suddenly suffered monumental deficit – food, medicines, drinking water, cooking gas, matches to light a candle, batteries to light a torch, linen to spread under the sky, far too many things that people suddenly lack for.

But there’s nobody selling them. Kathmandu isn’t staring at a scarcity of essential goods yet. The airport is piled over with aid cartons, and the Prithvi highway – the main supply route from India – is open and running.

But retail and distribution have become a concern. The citizenry remains panicked.

People are not reporting to essential services desks, shop owners are not lifting shutters, taxi men are few to find and exorbitant to hire. Hospitals are stretched. Public transport is haywire. The Internet is comatose and telephony very fickle.

Nepal is on a string.

The capital rang incessantly with the scream and whine of sirens, a frantic ambulance, a fire tender tearing through, troops rushing to rescue.

Overhead, today’s clear skies rumbled all day with rescue and relief operatics – chopper gnatting about on sorties, gargantuan transport aircraft groaning in and out.

Aid is pouring in overtime – from India, from China, from Pakistan, and from Israel among other nations. But as Yashraj Upadhya, a local aid worker struggling to evacuate aid crates from the airport red tape, remarked: “The stuff needs to flow, get around.”

Within stone’s throw from the airport’s periphery, smoke still rose over the dead at Pashupati as the sun came to set. And the Bagmati struggled to flow, quite unquiet.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/29/deluged-by-the-dead-pyres-set-water-on-fire/feed/0sankarshanthakurBack in Hashimpura after 28 years: It is not about memory alone; it is about not forgettinghttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/05/back-in-hashimpura-after-28-years-it-is-not-about-memory-alone-it-is-about-not-forgetting/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/05/back-in-hashimpura-after-28-years-it-is-not-about-memory-alone-it-is-about-not-forgetting/#respondSun, 05 Apr 2015 14:05:08 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1019Continue reading Back in Hashimpura after 28 years: It is not about memory alone; it is about not forgetting]]> After mass police acquittals, survivors ask: How can we forget loss of 42 sons?Zamanuddin, Hashimpura victim-survivor, breaks down as he displays a portrait of son Qamruddin who was shot dead by the PAC in May 1987

Meerut, April 4: Hashimpura lives down the belly of a violated orifice gaped upon the midtown street. Ripped walls and leaky sewer veins make the darkened cavern; its low dwellings are a mangle of rusted girders poked through unfinished masonry; fly and mosquito squadrons drone about leprous pools of defecation, decay is a work in progress.

It’s a molested air Hashimpura wears. Over the low-voltage trundle of its many loom sheds, residents look upon the arrived outsider with furtive victim eyes.

A patina of weary resignation has come to settle on their anguish and anger, and any hope of redemption there might have been. The pleas they regularly put out – one such vinyl banner hangs limp on the Hashimpura walls calling attention to, among others, the Prime Minister – are no more than notes to themselves, tatty dressing gauze on what won’t stop to bleed.

To sit down in Hashimpura’s bedraggled courtyards and listen to its people talk is to feel the cold suspicion they won’t be terribly beset if justice doesn’t step into their street after all. It’s been gone too long.

Zamanuddin replays how Hashimpura’s adult men were paraded out of their dwellings in the raid

Almost three decades ago, in May 1987, male residents of Hashimpura were rounded up in a cordon-and-search op by army jawans, herded out onto the main road and handed over to the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), Uttar Pradesh’s chief paramilitary formation.

It has never been clear what Hashimpura had done to call upon itself the raid, save that it was a time of communal simmer and confrontation. The unlocking of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute had spurred sectarian fires across Uttar Pradesh; Meerut had erupted recurrently – arson and clashes between rival processions in February 1986 that put the city under curfew for a fortnight; in April, just a month before, a more purposeful and bloody collision that brought up a dozen dead, several more injured, and a city beginning to fear itself. Meerut was on the burner.

The custody of Hashimpura from the late afternoon of May 22 accounted for more than 250 persons. They were all loaded onto the back of constabulary trucks and driven off – most to lockups and jails, and 55-odd to the banks of the Gangnahar, or the Ganga canal, which cuts through Muradnagar on the Meerut-Delhi road.

There, by dark, they were ordered down and lined up by the waterfront, arms raised, shot and left to float down the water. Forty-two of those died, a handful survived, feigning death until the PAC jawans thought their job done and departed, lying still on the mud-bank or slithering into thickets of elephant grass.

The Telegraph ‘s front page of June 1, 1987, carries a photograph of Zulfiqar Nasir, then 17, vest pulled over his head displaying wounds from bullets that had grazed his armpit. He’d escaped, pretending to be dead, and come to Delhi, aided by rights groups, to tell his tale.

Zulfiqar’s account was widely put down at the time as “exaggerated” or “hallucinatory”. It was only when dead bodies began to float up and along the Gangnahar as far downstream as Hindon, close to Delhi, that the horrific contours of the Hashimpura massacre began to emerge and be accepted.

An execution squad had gone to work and put dozens of blameless men to death in the lee of the nation’s capital, no more than 60 kilometres from Delhi.

Last week, a lower court let off all 16 surviving policemen accused of murder for lack of evidence. In effect, 42 lives had been collectively and abruptly put to end but nobody had done it. After three decades the combined resources of the executive and the judiciary had conjured a whodunit. Justice delayed, then denied.

Much of it was achieved through serial denial and dereliction – destruction and disappearance of evidence, tardy investigation and case-making, leaden progress in the courts.

One of the first FIRs in the case vanished, the weapons used to kill were never seized or cited, the bodies of victims were swiftly cremated rather than being buried so they could not be exhumed for examination.

Vrinda Grover, counsel for the Hashimpura litigants, is blunt to allege a collusive conspiracy to bury the massacre: “From the very beginning, there was a deliberate plan to either not collect the crucial pieces of evidence, to conceal them or allow them to be lost in the passage of time.”

Zulfiqar, now 45, might well believe it irretrievably lost. In the 28 years since he stood up at a press conference in Delhi to display his wounds and tell the story few survived to tell, Zulfiqar has trained himself as a machine-tools worker, established a small trade, got married, had three children and built a life of sorts.

But his central pursuit has eluded him – murder he witnessed first hand and himself narrowly escaped, but murder he cannot pin on the guilty, a constant shadow he can see but cannot grasp and nail.

” Khaate-peete hain, lekin naa izzat hai naa insaaf,” he says. ” Lekin chhor kaise dein, bhool kaise jaayen (We are well-to-do but we have neither self-respect nor justice; but how are we to let it be, leave it alone)?”

You don’t give up on your living; often, you don’t give up on your dead. It is not about memory alone; it is also about not forgetting.

It may seem a despondent enterprise but it is the enterprise of each Hashimpura home – an honourable closure. Unassuaged shadows shift about in these homes, heaving in dank corners, waiting to present themselves to anyone who would care.

Each home had men. Each home suffered scars from the operations of the afternoon of May 22, 1987. Those scars have aged but they remain sore, awaiting the poultice of, if nothing else, respect.

Zamanuddin, 78 and retired from most of life’s chores – “Now I just sit around and enjoy the company of friends while I can, there’s not much else to do” – wouldn’t bring up his murdered son until more than an hour into our conversation.

He wouldn’t bring up his battered other son, he wouldn’t bring up the rifle-butt wounds received on his own back that afternoon. He spoke at length of general grief and grievance.

“Everybody suffered, this whole mohalla, each of my friends, all these men you see.”

Half a dozen of them were there, seated under the dappled shade of a wizened creeper in the old-fashioned well of the house. Then the squeal of a child from some quarrel in some part of the house brought on the tears: ” Bachche rote hain to dil phat jaata hai (When children cry, it tears the heart).”

And the tears brought on a photo-frame and in it the fading image of a young man. Qamruddin, Zamanuddin’s eldest, photographed as he set out at the head of his baraat, handsome as a groom can get on wedding day, garlanded, portrait-ready.

It’s the only picture Zamanuddin has of Qamruddin, or would still be willing to see. There exists another but he has refused to hold or see it all these years.

Azizuddin, Zamanuddin’s youngest, fetches it – a black and white image turned sepia. It shows Qamruddin prone, a bullet hole in his upper chest, dead. He was among those the execution squad took to the banks of the Gangnahar on the night of May 22, 1987, and never came back.

“I was taken out too that afternoon and because I came back I assumed Qamar would too, we had done no wrong,” Zamanuddin says, now choking.

“I was 50 and they spared me for my age, they were after the younger lot, but it did not strike me while they were separating us, it did not strike me that was the last I was seeing of Qamar.”

He asks for the photo-frame be taken away, back to its dark corner in the anteroom; he gives his face a wipe, and then he steps out into Hashimpura’s rancid belly to point to us the way they were taken by the bayonets.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2015/04/05/back-in-hashimpura-after-28-years-it-is-not-about-memory-alone-it-is-about-not-forgetting/feed/0sankarshanthakurZamanuddin, Hashimpura victim-survivor, breaks down as he displays a portrait of son Qamruddin who was shot dead by the PAC in May 1987Zamanuddin replays how Hashimpura’s adult men were paraded out of their dwellings in the raid2014 in reviewhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2014/12/31/2014-in-review/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2014/12/31/2014-in-review/#respondWed, 31 Dec 2014 13:25:07 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.wordpress.com/?p=1017Continue reading 2014 in review]]>The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 29,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Beerwah, Dec. 6: Out barnstorming the countryside a day after multiple terror hits to the Valley, chief minister and National Conference spearhead Omar Abdullah spelt out a blunt “no” to any post-poll deal with the BJP.

“That’s not going to happen, people can keep speculating and dreaming about it,” Omar told The Telegraph in an exclusive chat along his roadshow. He was touring his newly adopted rural constituency Beerwah, southwest of Srinagar.

It appears imminent the ongoing elections will throw up a hung Jammu and Kashmir House and there has been speculation in some circles Omar could ally with the BJP, or support its power effort from outside. Omar conceded the mandate may be fractured but said nothing will drive him to an alliance with the BJP, which is making an audacious first-time bid for power in India’s only Muslim-majority state.

Pressed if he could do a deal with the BJP if only to keep his bitter Valley rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), out of power, Omar replied: “I don’t do desperate politics, I have never been desperate, nothing will make us go with the BJP, out of the question.”

That said, the chief minister turned a sceptical eye on dire predictions of a poll debacle that have trailed him this campaign. “Who knows what surprises might lie in store? To me it appears we are doing better each day. And frankly I am under no pressure, the judgement has already been pronounced we have lost, so for me everything is positive. I will tell you we are not doing as badly as many people think, we will spring surprises.”

The campaign seemed to have lost none of its nerve to yesterday’s violence. On the contrary, it retained a joyous temper in this rural patch, a riot of colour and the contrary clamour of competitors. People trailed their respective flags and leaders, piled perilously on top of buses and station wagons, whistling, chanting; a happy chaos reigned on narrow village crossroads, rival formations – NC, PDP, Sajjad Lone’s People’s Conference – eddied in confluence, desperate to untangle and head their own ways on campaign’s penultimate day.

The grasping adulation that came his way all day in far Beerwah pockets may have left Omar more buoyed than he has lately been. His caravan would barely begin to groan up the hilly country than it would be halted at another hamlet by another lot of waiting supporters, clotted mid-road, kitted out in the flaming NC red, waving the party flag, beating the panes of the campaign bus, raining toffee and lozenges on it like confetti.

” Sher aayas! Sher aayas!!” they cried out, a euphemistic reference to Omar’s grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, “Lion of Kashmir”. The women clapped and sang, the men danced around the campaign party, urging Omar out. He would alight, clamber up the roof of his bus and make a short address, beginning with Kashmiri, then turning to Urdu.

Beerwah is a hole in the ground – the roads are cratered, water is scarce, power occasional, poverty all-pervasive. Up and down the hill curves, it’s Beerwah’s deprivations Omar would address in the main. “We have not won an election here in 12 years, but I can see you have been given little. I seek to serve you, give me all of 12 months and I shall begin to change your circumstances, 12 months is all I ask, give me that opportunity.”

Beerwah and Omar are new to each other; it has the excitement of a new fling to both sides. Beerwah sees in Omar the prospect of a VVIP representative, Omar sees in his new constituents an opportunity all his own.

Between hurried spoonfuls of oatmeal off a hot case, between one stop and another, Omar put an explanation on why he had left the Abdullah family seat of Ganderbal and chosen Beerwah. “Look, my presence in Ganderbal had led to issues of party factionalism and oneupmanship among local leaders. But more importantly, Ganderbal is something I had inherited from my family, this place is something I can make my own over the years, as you can see these people need a lot of work done for them.”

He is contesting another family seat, though – Sonwar in the heart of Srinagar. But that, should he win it, would be a trust property kept aside for father Farooq Abdullah, awaiting a kidney transplant in London. “I don’t want my father’s long career to end on a losing note, so hopefully he will return and claim his old Sonwar. I can’t tell you how much he must be missing all of this.”

Omar was looking out of his bus at a group of women dancing with garlands held aloft, and their men clapping them on, a classic Farooq Abdullah moment. Omar would have us believe the moment hasn’t lapsed yet, uphill though it was from where we were.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones – Julius Caesar , William Shakespeare

Hajin (North Kashmir), Dec. 4: Where Kuka Parray is interred an argument still rings between good and evil, between what he was and he was not.

Who’d argue with a daughter whose eyes moisten when she points in the direction of Parray’s grave and lets out a sigh: ” Meray Papa… my father.”

Who’d argue with the fathers and mothers of those that Parray’s men wantonly killed – “that traitor who preyed upon his own”.

Not a blade of grass springs on Parray’s graveside, much less a blossom; and birds don’t alight to sing. For a cage it is where he lies, a padlocked enclosure of mortar and wrought iron filigree erected on his front lawn, a stained general in his cold labyrinth.

He wouldn’t be safe elsewhere in a place under open skies. He denied himself the eternal liberties the way he lived and died.

Between folk singer and folk terror, Kuka Parray became a blistered chapter in Kashmir’s contemporary tales, a chapter nobody fondly recalls but nobody would wish to forget in this neck of the woods.

As we drove towards Hajin, about 50 kilometres north of Srinagar towards Bandipore, through chinar and poplar plantations, stripped bare by winter and etched finely into the skies, driver Majeed let out a cautionary whistle to himself.

I asked what made him, and he said, ” Main tou ladka hi thha, lekin Kuka Parray ke naam se hi rooh kaanpti thhi, koi nahin aata thha iss raastey (I was only a boy then, but the mere mention of Kuka Parray sent a chill down our souls, nobody used to come this way).”

It was to be Majeed’s first time in Hajin, and he drove with Parray’s imagined apparitions haunting him.

“He was a horror, a horrible man, he killed so many, destroyed so many families, inflicted such atrocity in this area. Do you really want to go there?”

How many may Kuka Parray’s Ikhwan-ul-Musalmoon vigilantes have killed during their time? The beauty and the sadness is there exists no record.

Kuka Parray was designed and brought on stage so his presence there could be off the record. Parray and his Ikhwani gangsters were to be the stealth arm of the Indian state, a home-bred counter to Kashmiri insurgency at its peak in the mid-1990s.

They were hosted, trained, armed, then licensed to mayhem: kidnapping, extortion, torture, murder, unaccounted transgression by a band of unaccountable men. Nobody took responsibility for their deeds; when their horrors came to light the State enjoyed complete deniability: we have no role in this, it’s militants fighting militants.

When Parray was himself shot dead, mid-noon after inaugurating a cricket tourney close to home in September 2003, responsibility was swiftly attached but never owned: Jaish-e-Mohammed gunmen took Parray out, the government said, but nobody to date is quite sure.

Before that, though, Parray had partially achieved what he had covertly been tasked to: neutralise militant groups enough so elections could be held, the first after the aazaadi insurrection of 1989-90.

The 1996 polls were conducted at the end of bayonets – the army’s and Parray’s -but they were conducted, and since then they have never stopped being held in six-yearly cycles.

That was Parray’s dubious connection to the return of a process that has begun to receive huge, even feisty, participation in the Valley – it also took a demon’s hand to rekindle democracy where armed anarchy had come to reign.

It’s a process Parray’s younger son Imtiyaz has come to be part of today, as Congress candidate from Hajin; it’s moot how far his father’s stained legacy will take him. Part of his campaign he spent apologising for “mistakes of the past”, but Parray’s past isn’t easy to forget, much less forgive.

Parray himself, like Kay Kay Menon’s Khurram in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider, came elected to the Assembly as an Independent in 1996, essentially the beneficiary of a widespread and popular boycott.

But should you ask around, even in his native Hajin, people would tell you Khurram is too kindly a likeness of Parray, a man they had come to so despise they did not give his remains a community burial. That’s why that tomb on the front lawn, Parray’s eternal infamy.

It’s what his children have come to most regret, their father’s troubled legacy, that he never got his due credit.

“I used to hide who I was at school and university because they would say all kinds of things about Papa,” daughter Nusrat tells me, a morose air wimpled round her face.

“Papa was not a bad man, maybe some people around him did bad things, but not Papa, he wasn’t a killer, he was my Papa.”

Nusrat wouldn’t be photographed, but elder brother Wasim led me closer across the lawns towards the grave and took a pose. “We have nothing to be ashamed of, whatever it was, my father bravely flew India’s flag in these parts, fought India’s battles. He died for India, and nobody recognised that. Lesser people have got the President’s medal, nobody so much as came to bid him farewell.”

It must have dawned on Wasim, though, that nobody pins medals on soldiers that aren’t given uniforms, and only proxy wars to wage. Any good Kuka Parray may have done lies interred unacknowledged, the evil lives after him.

His political legacy is separatist but he is pushing for an elected mainstream ledge. His wife Asma is daughter to the Pakistan-based chairman of the JKLF, Amanullah Khan, but she is scurrying tirelessly around town and hamlet canvassing an Assembly seat for her husband.

His shadow ally in this militancy-infested border outpost is the “Hindu nationalist” Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. The taunt that has relentlessly trailed Sajjad’s campaign is: “Jo Modi kaa yaar hai, gaddar hai, gaddar hai (Whoever is Modi’s friend is a traitor, is a traitor).”

But if Sajjad’s adversaries — chief minister Omar Abdullah and challenger Mufti Mohammed Sayeed — believe they are embarrassing the People’s Conference (PC) leader with the Modi link, they are shooting north Kashmir’s grey chill.

Sajjad is playing Modi like his password to an Assembly debut. To his final pocket borough rally — a milling churn of the PC’s blue flags in Handwara’s Chinar Park — he throws the issue for an impromptu referendum.

“Tell me, did I commit a mistake by meeting Narendra Modi?” he cries out.

“Noooooo!” the crowd responds. “Tell me,” he asks again, as if to push the point home once and for all, “if I want to bring development for you, should I not be meeting the Prime Minister of India?”

This time the endorsement rings louder around the congregation: “Yeaasssss!”

Between a “No” and a “Yes”, Sajjad has turned what would classically have been a fatal allegation against him into a working asset — a man who could use his truck with Modi to fetch deliverables to this deprived remoteness.

So, is fringe ex-separatist to enthroned nationalist the emerging power axis in Jammu and Kashmir, the propulsion force for the BJP’s “Mission 44+”?

As I wait to meet Sajjad and put the question to him, one of his poll managers whispers to me in the excited hubbub of the PC’s Handwara camp office.

“All along the Abdullahs and the Muftis have monopolised power by playing proxy franchisees of Delhi; we thought why shouldn’t we establish a direct link? What’s wrong with that? Everyone in Kashmir has to deal with the powers in Delhi,” the poll manager said.

Deal? Is that the word? Is he in a deal with Modi? Sajjad turns affronted at the suggestion, almost as if he has been told he is the BJP’s fifth column masquerading Kashmiri aspiration.

“Why must there be a deal? I have done nothing secret, I met Modi openly and spoke openly about it. Yes I do say good things about him because he behaved like an understanding elder, he did not punch me in the face.”

The burden of his campaign song is the same as Narendra Modi’s, though — rid Kashmir of the Abdullahs and Muftis, usher change.

“But of course,” Sajjad agrees, “we have to save Kashmir from the dynasties and their pampered children who have no connect with the people, can’t see their needs. We need change, change is our slogan.”

People’s Conference leader Sajjad Lone meets supporters at his Handwara camp office before setting off on the campaign trail.

It is the last day of the campaign in the Kupwara-Handwara belt; Sajjad is battling fatigue and a besetting cold. He’s also weary of insinuation by rivals that he’s shaken hands with the devil, those that are sworn to abrogating Article 370 and undermining Kashmir’s special status.

“Look, I have gone hoarse telling people I have made no compromises. My stand on Article 370 is that it has to be strengthened. I want to represent my people, not their enemies.”

Sajjad sits on one of two mattresses thrown on a carpeted wooden floor; it’s where he and Asma have lived the better part of the campaign, a bare room in an unplastered outhouse in midtown Handwara.

A pewter samovar keeps out the cold, and an armed sentry holds zealous audience-seekers at the door; every now and then someone manages to land a knock and is counselled patience.

But the palaver over his meeting with Modi isn’t as easily managed, it drifts in unfettered: Sajjad has sold out.

“Where have I sold out, tell me?” he retorts to the charge both Omar and the Mufti have made.

“They won’t even stop at smearing my wife; doesn’t she have the right to campaign for her husband? If I met Modi, it was to seek development for my people. He can do things no government in Kashmir has bothered doing: just go around and see how backward and poor this region is. No roads, no hospitals, no colleges, no jobs, people eke out a subsistence life, and nobody has bothered. If I ask Modi and he says ‘Yes’, is that a crime?”

North Kashmir is a land of benighted beauty, overlaid with pristine valleys and meadows — Lolab, Nowgam, Bangus, Reshwani, each possessed of distinct seductions but none even a scratch on Kashmir’s crowded tourist map.

What is more striking and in-the-face everywhere you go is insufficiency and abandonment, a beauteous duckling scarred to ugliness by poverty.

For far too long, militancy held this patch hostage. For far too long, it also remained overlooked by the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party, whose political home ground lies south of here.

Now, of a sudden, Sajjad has emerged from decades of the PC’s commitment to separatism, to champion corrections. Is there a real prospect he can? It’s five north Kashmir seats his bets really are on — Handwara, Kupwara, Karna, Langate and Lolab.

Chance would be a fine thing if he can wrest even half those. What is a man able to do with fewer numbers in an 87-member Assembly than you can count on fingers of a single palm?

“I am not deluded about what I can or cannot do,” Sajjad says, disarmingly honest. “I know my limitations, but I also know my strengths. What I have in mind for north Kashmir no state government has the power to provide, it’s only New Delhi that can do it. And there I have placed my demands and been heard.”

In knocking at Modi’s door, Sajjad may well have played at a meditated paradox; oftentimes, opposites attract.

Handwara-Kupwara votes on December 2

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2014/12/02/lones-unlikely-asset-in-valley-no-yes-and-modi/feed/0sankarshanthakurAsma, Sajjad Lone’s wife, seeking votes in the Handwara countryside.People’s Conference leader Sajjad Lone meets supporters at his Handwara camp office before setting off on the campaign trail.Home a bus ride away on the other side of the hill, but out of reachhttps://sankarshanthakur.com/2014/12/01/home-a-bus-ride-away-on-the-other-side-of-the-hill-but-out-of-reach/
https://sankarshanthakur.com/2014/12/01/home-a-bus-ride-away-on-the-other-side-of-the-hill-but-out-of-reach/#respondMon, 01 Dec 2014 13:01:33 +0000http://sankarshanthakur.com/?p=1002Continue reading Home a bus ride away on the other side of the hill, but out of reach]]>Panun Kashmir protagonists Virender Raina and Ashwini Chrangoo in Jammu: “We are victims of a holocaust.”Agitated Pandit migrants at the Jagti township near Jammu: “We are actors of a forgotten tragedy.”The Telegraph report on the first wave of Kashmir migration in early 1990

Jammu, Nov. 28: Among The Telegraph’s reports on the first torrent of Pandits fleeing the Valley in 1989-90 was the story of a little girl and her grandmother.

They’d been ejected from their Habbakadal home in Srinagar and flung into the disarray of a campsite on Jammu’s outskirts. The girl played with sand in a pit, as she would do with snow; her grandmother hadn’t rid herself of a lifetime’s habit of carrying a kangri (firepot) around.

The Jammu weather didn’t warrant a firepot, so instead of embers she stored in it lozenges for her granddaughter and keys to a faraway house she’d never return to unlock. It’s likely the old lady is no more, the little girl would be a 30-something somewhere. It’s unlikely she’s home.

Kashmir’s Pandits flew frightened and far from the violent aazaadi eruption, like birds off a startled tree. In the 25 years since, they’ve gone everywhere but not back up the Banihal Pass, never to that native tree of theirs.

The horror of departure shivers Raka Khashu after all these years. “I was a schoolgirl and I heard our entire neighbourhood warning us of consequences, from the mosques, from the streets, it was horrific. And then they came home and shot my grandfather dead.”

Now a corporate executive, and likely a contemporary of that little girl in the Jammu sandpit, Raka says she will never be anything but “entirely Kashmiri” but will never return to Kashmir to live: “It makes my ears echo with the clamour of murder and gore.”

Each year away has become a jagged piece in the Pandits’ jagged mirror of emotions — loss, longing, failure, frustration, resentment, anger, a wistful bereftness.

It’s what rings off the broken missives scientist Samvit Kaul despatches from his Bangalore remove. “Habbakadal…the streets of my childhood, where there is no Prithvi Nath Tickoo (anymore) to guide you to the place where his son’s bloodstains would have disappeared in the footprints of those who walk that earth…”

But closer home, in the migrant trenches around Jammu, bitterness bites harder, and poetry won’t relieve the pain. “We have gone numb fighting, trying to make our case, but nobody listens,” says Ramesh Razdan, an émigré entrepreneur, “What must we do to get a hearing, take to arms?”

Every hopeless season of exile, Kashmir’s Pandits have upscaled the nomenclature of their circumstances, from migration to displacement to ethnic cleansing to holocaust. “Don’t say holocaust is too big a word,” argues community leader Virender Raina. “Holocaust is not about the number of dead alone. Holocaust is about other horrors done to you, holocaust is about the loss of language and memory, holocaust is about losing our place in the world, our entire ancestry and heritage. What are the future generations of Pandits to have? The vacuum of what used to be?”

In Jagti, a sore of a migrant ghetto located conveniently away from Jammu, plain civic muddle is a cloying reminder to civilisational loss. To call Jagti a township, as they do, is a stretch; crumbled hovel is what it is, a rash of low-income housing boxed together beside the Tawi riverbed.

For days, often weeks, there is no power. They have little access to clean water, schools or health care. They live marooned, dozens to each pigeonhole, in the putrid discharge oozing from open drains, amid foraging pigs and pie-dogs.

Jagti is an unassuaged carbuncle spewing pus. “We are the actors of a forgotten tragedy,” Avtar Krishna, a retired schoolteacher, leaps out from a gaggle of gathered colonists to rail. “But mind you, someone will pay a price for this, a very heavy price. They are paying it already, without us there, Kashmir has already become a full-blown anti-national imposition on India.”

Bhushan Bhatt, a policeman, joins in. “And look at where this nation has thrown those who held its flag high, in such a hell. And for all the difficulties of living here, we are not a municipal problem, we don’t need relief and financial packages, we need our land back.”

Their rage is not less for home being just the other side of the hill from where they stand, a bus-ride, a hop away by flight. But it is not a journey that can be made.

Home remains a close-by place impossibly beyond reach. And all too often it provokes a scimitar flash of exasperation that demands drastic redressal: “If the Valley can be vacated of Pandits, why can the Valley not be vacated for Pandits? We are a people, we belong to a land of ours and we are no longer ready to share it or live under subjugation.” Desperate remedy for desperate straits, but it’s what Dr Ajay Chrangoo, physician and activist, wants — a knife run through geography to carve out a “Hindu habitat” in the Muslim-dominated Valley.

It’s an idea that has assumed form and become manifest in Pandit consciousness: Panun Kashmir, Our Kashmir, not merely the notion of it, but the tactile shape of a map that takes up nearly all the Kashmir Valley, from Baramulla in the north to Banihal in the south.

It seems a fair thing to do to sit the authors of Panun Kashmir down and have them explain how that map will morph from paper dream to reality on ground.

To Ashwini Chrangoo, leader of one faction of the eponymous movement, the resolution is simple enough. “Maps are redrawn,” he argues, “That’s no big thing, it has happened in Europe in this century, it has happened in India that smaller states have been created.”

But the landmass he wants as his own is not an empty place, it has towns, villages, neighbourhoods, it has hundreds of thousands of people that Chrangoo is not prepared to share space with. “All I want is my land back to myself, a land rid of anti-national traitors,” he retorts coldly. “How that is achieved is merely procedural. If we can be displaced, why not others? I assure you it can be done, that is what our fight is for.”

He won’t quite use the words, but even the deaf would discern Chrangoo is suggesting a counter cleansing, a messy epitaph to Kashmiriyat.

]]>https://sankarshanthakur.com/2014/12/01/home-a-bus-ride-away-on-the-other-side-of-the-hill-but-out-of-reach/feed/0sankarshanthakurAgitated Pandit migrants at the Jagti township near Jammu: “We are actors of a forgotten tragedy.” The Telegraph report on the first wave of Kashmir migration in early 1990